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Book Reviews

Clive S. Kessler , Robert H. Taylor , Hongwei Bao , Tori Sanderson , Dia Da

Costa , Andrew McGarrity , Rachel Sturman , Vera Mackie , Robert F. Phillips ,
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Tineke Hellwig

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Robin Gerster , Yoko Harada , Kazuki Onji , Narrelle Morris , Edwina Palmer , Gyu-Jin Hwang ,
En Young Ahn , Norman G. Owen & Tineke Hellwig (2011) Book Reviews, , 35:1, 115-147, DOI:
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Asian Studies Review
March 2011, Vol. 35, pp. 115–147

Book Reviews

MALAYSIA
BARRY WAIN. Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times.
Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. x, 363 pp. US$105.00,
hardcover.

PAWANCHEEK MARICAN. Anwar on Trial: In the Face of Injustice. Petaling

Jaya: Gerakbudaya, 2009. xvii, 386 pp. RM100.00, hardcover; RM50.00, paper.

For months the Customs authorities blocked the importation into Malaysia of Barry
Wain’s account of Dr Mahathir’s prime ministership, while they considered whether
it should be banned. For his part, Dr Mahathir, not appreciating the legal nicety
that one might only seek such redress provided one had made a timely and thorough
effort to prevent the dissemination of an alleged libel, urged its release so that he
might sue the author and publisher. Predictably, after this fey pantomime and fervid
publicity, the book, when it was released for distribution in mid-2010, sold like hot
cakes – or spicy noodles.
Meanwhile, it was available in Singapore, from where serious scholars and curious
thrill-seekers quietly obtained copies. Accounts written in Singapore of its argument
and contents soon appeared in the Malaysian electronic media. Even so, when it was
released in Malaysia, what Wain has to say came as a surprise to many. And also a
shock: after Wain outlined his analysis of Dr Mahathir and his political epoch at an
academic event, an official ‘‘please explain’’ was demanded from the University of
Malaya.
Surprise and shock were the direct result of the discovery by Malaysians that
Wain’s book went far further than had initially been suggested. Early reports had
merely suggested that the Mahathir era had been wasteful: that its grand
construction projects and international economic interventions (in the tin market
and foreign currency trading, for example) had cost tens of billions of dollars more
that they should have. Wain’s charge, so it had seemed, had simply been one of
waste, faulty planning, and poor management – and of the ensuing ‘‘skim-off’’ or
corruption, so profitable politically to those who were part of the prime minister’s
linked schemes of party-based economic corporatism and political hegemonism, that
his grandiose extravagances had entailed.
The balance sheet that Wain in fact drew up was far wider, and more damning,
than simply one that contrasted Mahathir’s nationalist economic ambitions and
developmental dynamism with the wastefulness of their pursuit. It was a savage
political audit. On the one hand, Dr Mahathir delivered social peace and sustained

ISSN 1035-7823 print/ISSN 1467-8403 online/11/010115-33

DOI: 10.1080/10357823.2011.552062
116 Book Reviews

economic growth, introducing increasing numbers of Malaysians to middle-class

comforts. By the end of his 22-year tenure, Dr Mahathir had remade the country in
his own image. Although he became addicted to the job, Dr Mahathir did not seek it
for the perks or the pay-offs. He had a mission, to bring about an economic and
social revolution that would turn Malaysia into a fully developed and respected
nation within a generation, with Malays playing a prominent part (p. 54).
Yet this required extraordinary and sustained ruthlessness and political dexterity.
His life’s project of Malay national redemption within a Malay-centred but more
than exclusively Malay nation and Malay-led state required his continuing personal
leadership, his close oversight and management. So political longevity was essential,
regardless of the cost. The price could always be rationalised in terms of his project,
which was for the good of the country. There was no higher priority than staying in
power (p. 54).
Despite its high aspirations and Dr Mahathir’s unquestionable sincerity in
pursuing his project’s realisation, Wain’s portrait, and in many ways his more
implicit than explicit judgment of the man, is a damning one. In case after case,
instance after instance, he highlights the personal style that is the man’s political
signature.
He is ruthless, treacherous, incapable of self-doubt. He can be sentimental about
himself but heartless to others. He can be generous and gracious, but not
compassionate, towards rivals and critics. Outwardly modest, he is driven by an
immodest self-righteousness. His political project was perhaps that of a Southeast
Asian Ataturk, but in political character he was a Malay Robespierre. In pursuing his
own regime of preferred virtues, he built much that may or may not last, but he also
destroyed much, including all the countervailing institutions of liberal restraint upon
the arbitrary exercise of power – the judiciary, the press and media, the public service,
the universities. He left Malaysia economically richer but in various more broadly
human ways shrunken and reduced: institutionally maimed, imaginatively impover-
ished and psychologically inhibited. What modernity would a people incapable of
exercising, or even imagining, personal autonomy ever be capable of sustaining?
Though incomplete, Wain’s political portrait is indispensable and his implied
verdict is challenging. Speaking of verdicts, one of the central episodes of the
Mahathir era, especially in foreign eyes, was the downfall and legal pursuit of his
former deputy and one-time chosen successor, Anwar Ibrahim. When the two fell out
Anwar was tried both for official misconduct and for sodomy. Surprisingly, he is now
in 2010 being tried once again on another new sodomy charge. His predicament here
recalls Lady Bracknall’s remark in The Importance of Being Earnest that ‘‘to lose one
parent may be regarded as a misfortune’’, but ‘‘to lose both looks like carelessness’’.
Whatever the facts of the case and the truth of the charges, Anwar’s two earlier
trials were a travesty of justice. The legal pursuit of Anwar was a truly terrible story,
and one that is now badly told in Pawancheek Marican’s account of the 1998
corruption trial. The book provides, in some ways, a useful record. But it displays a
failing common to many lawyers. Most are incapable of writing anything – a
newspaper article, a magazine commentary, a book – that does not read like a turgid
legal brief. To borrow their musty idiom, I submit that Mr Pawancheek Marican’s
affidavit betrays its assiduous preparation for a jurisdiction residing elsewhere. The
political public is a rather different audience from a court. The judgment of public
 Book Reviews 117

opinion is swayed and fashioned in ways that few lawyers, especially those of the
archly mannered and self-indulgently archaising Malaysian bar, understand. Dr
Mahathir’s high-handed disregard for troublesome legalisms may be inexcusable,
but his visceral impatience with the legal profession, as he experienced it, is not
unfathomable.

CLIVE S. KESSLER
The University of New South Wales
Ó 2011 Clive S. Kessler

LEON COMBER. Malaya’s Secret Police 1945–60: The Role of the Special Branch
in the Malayan Emergency. Clayton, Victoria: Monash Asia Institute; Singapore:
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008. xix, 324 pp. A$27.95, paper.

The Malayan Emergency, the so-called police action, fought between the British
colonial government, and their Malay and Chinese allies, against the predominantly
ethnically Chinese Malayan Communist Party (MCP), between the end of World
War II and Malaysia’s independence, has been much analysed in print over the
years. For the British, it was an object lesson in how to fight successfully a
Communist insurgency. To the Americans and others, including the Australian
government, during their embroilment in the subsequent Vietnam War, it was a
lesson in what should or could be done by predominantly Caucasian armies fighting
against a determined indigenous Communist force in Asia. Many of the men who
participated in the campaign were well educated, articulate and informed soldiers,
some of whom went on to become scholars of Malaya and Malaysia. Hence, one
might begin to wonder why another book on the subject is required.
Leon Comber provides the answer. Himself a young participant in the police
during the Emergency, he subsequently published 13 other books on Asian politics,
history and literature before Malaya’s Secret Police. While other authors have
referred to the importance of secret intelligence in ultimately defeating the MCP,
Leon Comber provides to my knowledge the most detailed accounts of how Special
Branch was organised, trained, operated, and informed the counter-insurgency
effort. Many of the insights are fascinating, such as the radios sold to MCP members
that in turn allowed their movements to be traced. Others are of the kind that
doubtless caused frustration and dissatisfaction among Special Branch members,
not least fairly continual organisational and personnel issues. As the author was a
participant in what he describes, he is able to make more interesting what could
potentially be a rather tedious report on organisational matters. He does much to
make clear the backgrounds and prior experiences of the leading personnel of a long
war fought with great patience.
Anthony Short, one of the leading scholars of the Emergency, in his introduction
rightly praises the volume under review as an additional account of the history of the
Emergency. The book is chronologically organised and provides a fair and full
account of the issues that are conventionally believed to have lain behind both the
Emergency and the eventual victory of the British and later Malaysian governments.
Theoretically the book offers no new interpretations, but it is a thorough history of
118 Book Reviews

the war based on wide reading in British, Malayan and Singaporean archives and
records. The bibliography and other documentation is thorough and makes the
book a source for many future students of the Emergency and of the role of
intelligence in defeating an indigenous insurgency in hostile terrain. In the end, the
major lesson is that you can never have too much intelligence on the plans of your
enemy but, as the Americans thoroughly demonstrated in Iraq and Afghanistan, as
well as in Vietnam, you certainly can have too little. Leon Comber has underscored
an important lesson from the Malayan Emergency that subsequent western efforts to
impose political order on modern Asian societies have ignored.

ROBERT H. TAYLOR
Visiting Professor, City University of Hong Kong
Ó 2011 Robert H. Taylor

BURMA
SEAN TURNELL. Fiery Dragons: Banks, Moneylenders and Microfinance in
Burma. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2009. xxiii, 387 pp. £45.00, hardcover; £18.99,
paper.

The formal academic study of banking and finance in Myanmar began in 1931 with
the publication of J.S. Furnivall’s pioneering An Introduction to the Political
Economy of Burma. It advanced little subsequently and, indeed, deteriorated in the
years following the military coup of 1962. Dr Turnell’s book is therefore very
welcome as a contribution to a now reviving field of study. Beginning with the
pioneering work of Khin Maung Gyi et al., Economic Development of Burma (2000),
and most recently Koichi Fujita et al., The Economic Transition in Myanmar after
1988 (2009), the last decade has seen the emergence of serious economic studies of
Myanmar, a positive development. Fiery Dragons, unlike the larger and more
comprehensive works referred to above, concerns the more limited but vital field of
banking and credit, especially rural credit.
The ‘‘fiery dragons’’ of the title are a reference to the Chettiars, the caste of South
Asian moneylenders who, as Dr Turnell discusses thoroughly and at length, were
both the source of much of the rural credit that kept the colonial rice economy of
British Burma afloat, and the butt of nationalist attacks on the evils of capitalism
and colonialism. The book is particularly strong on the colonial period, and thanks
to the rich documentary sources the author consulted, not only the discussion of the
Chettiars and their activities, but three subsequent chapters on British adminis-
trative dreams of creating a cooperative credit system, Burma’s subordination to the
central bank of India, and the roles of Indian, British, American and Japanese
banks, are very helpful.
The book becomes, however, progressively less integrated and substantiated, and
as Dr Turnell proceeds, his cheerful, nay puckish, tone begins to slip as he finds less
to approve and more to criticise, and in the end, his text occasionally becomes snide.
The shambles of an inadequate and disjointed financial system after the destruction
of World War II is the theme of the first chapter dealing with the postcolonial
 Book Reviews 119

economy. The gradual untying of the strings that bound the Myanmar economy to
India and Britain commenced during this period, ending in the 1960s when the
Burmese kyat left the sterling area. For the 1950s, the author has a reasonably
complete set of secondary sources upon which to rely, but they are not of the textual
richness of the banking and other reports of the colonial period that he employs.
The advent of the military government in 1962 ended relatively easy access to
information on the economy of Myanmar by foreigners. Increasingly, the only
sources available were in Burmese, and few economists bothered to go to the
country and hunt them out. Hence, Dr Turnell has fewer sources upon which to
draw. His lack of sympathy with the state socialism of the Ne Win era is hardly
surprising. There are few to be found within or outside Myanmar who are willing to
admit their previous admiration for, if not complicity in, the Burmese Road to
Socialism.
However, it is in the final three chapters that the author’s arguments outrun his
sources. These deal with the abandonment of socialism and the adoption of a
dirigiste form of market capitalism, the undermining of a number of private banks in
2003 (about which he has written previously), and an interesting but incomplete
discussion of current efforts to create microfinance for Myanmar’s poverty-stricken
rural communities. In the first, he relies heavily, and uncritically, upon political
activist exile media. In the second, he rather makes a mountain out of a molehill.
How can a country in which a miniscule proportion of the population have bank
accounts suffer a crisis when a few banks go to the wall? Myanmar, as the author
points out quite correctly, does not have a banking system. No financial system, no
national financial crisis.
Fiery Dragons discusses an important issue in the evolving political economy of
Myanmar. One would be denying reality not to recognise that the issues that Dr
Turnell addresses are crucial to the emergence of the modern nation that the current
military government says it is creating. That government has not adequately
addressed the issues that the author presents, but his narrowing the topic of
economic reform in Myanmar to that of finance and banking is equally constraining.
Myanmar’s problems are many, and as J.S. Furnivall (whom Turnell, borrowing
from a British official in postcolonial Burma, disparages as having his head in the
clouds) said, all of them are unsolvable. It will take more than elusive ‘‘freedom’’ to
address the nearly two hundred years of mistaken or failed policies that underlay
Myanmar’s economic underdevelopment.
ROBERT H. TAYLOR
Visiting Professor, City University of Hong Kong
Ó 2011 Robert H. Taylor

CHINA
ELAINE JEFFREYS (ed) China’s Governmentalities: Governing Change, Changing
Government. London: Routledge, 2009. 178 pp. £75.00, hardcover.

China’s Governmentalities, edited by Elaine Jeffreys, is a welcome addition to

Routledge’s ‘China in Transition’ Series. It makes a significant contribution to
120 Book Reviews

China Studies, especially in its examination of governmentality issues. The book has
two aims: first, to offer a more nuanced understanding of contemporary Chinese
politics as it shifts from the Maoist emphasis on the centrality of the state and the
government to the post-Mao diffusion of power and politics; and second, to
contribute to the current debates on the practices and impacts of neoliberal
strategies of governance in non-western and non-liberal contexts.
Chapter 1 offers a theoretical underpinning for the whole book. The authors of
this chapter, Elaine Jeffreys and Gary Sigley, argue that China’s adoption of market
reforms since 1978 has resulted in the emergence of a ‘‘hybrid socialist-neoliberal (or
perhaps neo-Leninist) form of political rationality, one that is both authoritarian in
a familiar political and technocratic sense and yet also seeks to govern certain
subjects through their own autonomy’’ (p. 2). Indeed, this book’s central concern is
China’s changing forms of governance from the Maoist to the post-Mao era, and the
continuing existence of the government in this process. The authors reject the
conservative view that considers Chinese government omnipresent and inherently
suppressive. They encourage us to think beyond the China/West divide, and
consider liberalism and neoliberalism as forms of governance. ‘‘Self-governance’’, as
the authors argue, does not signify the retreat of the state and is not free from power.
Michael Dutton’s chapter, ‘Passionately Governmental’, focuses on the role of
affect in constructing revolutionary subjectivities and in mobilising mass politics
during the Maoist era. By tracing the vicissitude of the friend-enemy oppositional
politics in China’s communist revolutionary history, Dutton delineates how
emotions were evoked politically to create politicised individuals and masses. In
doing so, Dutton challenges the commonly perceived conflict between emotion and
rationality by pointing out that human emotions can be calculated, controlled and
directed by the state. By bringing together governmentality studies and affect
studies, Dutton deepens our understanding of the role of affect in governance and
calls for more contextualised and grounded research on the politics of emotions in
the Chinese context.
Lisa Hoffman’s chapter questions the view that regards the environment as
natural attributes. She demonstrates how the natural environment has been a site of
interventions in China by state and non-state actors, especially through manip-
ulative notions such as ‘‘sustainability’’ and ‘‘green’’ city building. Through the case
study of Dalian’s transformation from an industrial city to an environmentally-
friendly city, Hoffman points out that governmental actions related to the
environment have been framed through market mechanisms, quantifiable measure-
ment and the localisation of sustainable development. She also emphasises the
interaction of multiple actors – global, national, local, political, economic and
cultural – in place-making and subject-making in contemporary China.
Issues such as rural to urban migration (Feng Xu), ethnicity and development
(Russell Harwood), urban community (David Bray), religion (Susette Cooke) and
sexual health (Elaine Jeffreys and Huang Yingying) are dealt with in the remaining
chapters of the book, which further demonstrate the changing rationalities and
practices of governmentality in contemporary China through both theoretical
discussions and concrete case studies. Although the authors generally agree that
governmentality is both about ‘‘practices of government’’ and about ‘‘practices of
the self’’ (p. 119), the latter are often subsumed in the former, and thus become
 Book Reviews 121

neglected in this collection. Different authors in this volume seem to have divergent
understandings of the term ‘‘governmentality’’. For some, ‘‘governmentality’’ is
synonymous with ‘‘government’’ or ‘‘state control’’, and the Chinese state still plays
a largely repressive and manipulative role in all aspects of people’s lives. The
Foucauldian nuances of power and ‘‘technologies of the self’’ is lost in many
discussions. Asking the following questions may help to take the present study
further: How do people cope with the seemingly omnipresent state? How successful
are the governing strategies? To answer these questions, more grounded
ethnographic work should be conducted in order to better understand the complex
mechanism of how governmentality works at the everyday level. Such ethnographic
work will probably make governmentality studies scholars feel less pessimistic, as,
although surveillance and control may pervade every corner of society, people’s
reception and negotiation of these governing techniques may undermine their
efficacy.
The strength of this volume lies in its successful challenge to the China/West and
authoritarianism/liberalism dichotomies that prevail in governmentality studies and
its effective assertion of the relevance of Foucauldian theories in China Studies. It
also raises some important questions and issues that deserve further discussion in the
future. For example, does affective governmentality still function in contemporary
China? How does governmentality relate to media, space and popular culture? What
role do gender, sexuality and desire play in governmentality? What is the
relationship between governmentality and nationalism? How is governmentality
glocalised? In many ways, this book sets the agenda for governmentality studies in
the Chinese context. Indeed, as one of the first collections of essays on this topic, this
book has certainly fulfilled its goal of decolonising governmentality studies and
bringing Foucauldian theories into critical dialogue with China Studies.

HONGWEI BAO
The University of Sydney
Ó 2011 Hongwei Bao

LOUISE EDWARDS and ELAINE JEFFREYS (eds) Celebrity in China. Hong

Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010. 286 pp. US$28.00, paper.

In Celebrity in China, Louise Edwards and Elaine Jeffreys have compiled a powerful
and highly accessible breakdown of celebrity construction and culture in modern
China. A wide range of Chinese celebrities is covered, from state-promoted military
heroes and role-model mothers, to subversive literary figures and internet self-
promoters. The volume spans the history of the PRC from its establishment until
recent years. Naturally, the role of the Party-state in the production of famous
figures is a running theme throughout the book: the promotion of models and
exemplary individuals lends a complexity to celebrity culture that rests somewhere
between publicity and propaganda, and highlights the connections between the
two. In Louise Edwards’ chapter on military celebrity, the distinction is made
between the hero and the celebrity, the former receiving recognition for
outstanding accomplishments, the latter acquiring fame through public visibility.
122 Book Reviews

In contemporary Chinese society these formerly demarcated categories of hero and

celebrity can merge, where heroes are constructed as celebrities and thus ‘‘presented
for consumption as inflated depictions of human abilities, attributes and talents’’,
for particular moral and political goals. One example is Johanna Hood’s account of
the HIV/AIDS ‘‘hero’’, Pu Cunxin, whose celebrity status comes not only from his
position as a figure of popular culture but also from the perception of his heroic
promotion of public health.
The contributions to Celebrity in China examine celebrity as ‘‘a product of
complex cultural and economic processes’’. Yingjie Guo’s chapter on China’s
‘‘Celebrity Mothers’’ explores the Party-state’s promotion of social cohesion that
lies behind the ‘‘Ten Outstanding Mothers’’ campaign, and in doing so, reveals
much about the CCP’s ideological shift from economic development to the
construction of a harmonious society. Similar ideological changes can be found in
Elaine Jeffreys’ account of China’s ‘‘Chastity Heroines’’ in her chapter on China’s
‘‘Accidental Celebrities’’. Jeffreys explores media accounts of women who respond
to threats of forced prostitution by leaping from buildings, and the coverage of
citizens’ charitable donations to these women’s medical funds, arguing that
constructing both the victims and the donors as celebrities encourages the emergence
of a new kind of ‘‘Good Samaritan’’ Chinese citizen. Here, Party-driven media
produces temporary celebrity in order to stimulate a charitable response from its
public.
Shuyu Kong discusses the development of the literary celebrity in China ‘‘from
reformers to rebels’’. The emergence of the literary ‘‘bad-boy or bad-girl’’ reflects the
newly commercialised and competitive book market, where writers can achieve fame
and wealth without direct CCP intervention. Kong examines three literary celebrities
from different decades – Wang Meng, Wang Shuo and Wei Hui – who each
redefined the literary figure’s social and cultural role in particular ways. Wang Meng
had a problematic relationship with the Chinese Party-state, although he was not
necessarily a dissident writer. Wang Shuo challenged preconceptions about the
writer’s moral duty to educate the masses, and his sharp business sense and use of
mass media contributed greatly to his celebrity status. Wei Hui’s rise to international
fame constituted the first in a long line of ‘‘bad-girl babe writers’’, who capitalised
on a rising niche market for women’s ‘‘privacy literature’’. In their own particular
ways, each of these literary celebrities has achieved fame through rebellion – against
the Party-state, and the appropriate roles of, or morality in, literature. As Kong
states, celebrity construction in post-reform China has transformed from a Party-
dominated process to a system dominated rather by the market and individually
crafted campaigns. This is a theme also noted in I.D. Roberts’ chapter on internet
celebrity in China – particularly the infamous Furong Jiejie (Sister Hibiscus), whose
self-promotion reflects a rising individualism and (perhaps more interestingly) whose
celebrity status is a product of a growing media industry, irregular censorship laws
and the growth in internet use.
Other fascinating chapters in this volume include Mary Farquhar’s exploration of
Jet Li’s celebrity status, and Louisa Schein’s study of the celebrity of the Miao
minority’s female pop singers and the notion of ‘‘flexible celebrity’’. Gloria Davies
and M.E. Davies recount the rise to fame of Jin Xing, ‘‘China’s Transsexual Star of
Dance’’, and David J. Davies highlights once again the nature of ‘‘model’’ celebrities
 Book Reviews 123

in the business world, as China’s economy grows, alongside the numbers of ‘‘new
rich’’ and the television shows that extol them.
One of the great strengths of this book is the considerable contextual background
established for each study of a particular type of celebrity – these are presented as
unique, and while overarching trends in celebrity culture that appear to be exclusive
to China are mentioned, the focus remains specific rather than general. The result of
such an approach is a versatile, readable work, bound to be a foremost source of
information on celebrity in China for both specialists and non-specialists alike.

TORI SANDERSON
The University of Sydney
Ó 2011 Tori Sanderson

INDIA
DUNCAN McDUIE-RA. Civil Society, Democratization and the Search for Human
Security: The Politics of the Environment, Gender and Identity in Northeast India.
New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 2009. 219 pp. US$62.00, hardcover.

This book offers an invaluable empirical study of the relationship between identity
politics, civil society, and insecurity in northeast India – a region simultaneously
over-determined by colonial categories of representation and largely neglected in
grounded analyses of contemporary politics. Studying the intersections and
disjunctures among the state, NGOs, and activists in the Khasi Hills, Duncan
McDuie-Ra shows that in the province of Meghalaya, what he calls the ‘‘outsider
discourse’’ – which pivots politicisation on the distinction between ‘‘tribal’’ and
‘‘non-tribal’’ – dominates modes of addressing insecurity. This book contributes to
debates on the adequacy of privileging identity insecurity through the ‘‘outsider
discourse’’ to address the complex forces, sources, and effects of human insecurity in
northeast India today.
McDuie-Ra’s theoretical contribution is to view the relationship between civil
society and human security as constitutive. In Chapter 1, he argues for going beyond
Eurocentric definitions and instrumental analyses of civil society, as well as binaries
of civil versus political society. Instead, he draws on a Gramscian framework for a
fluid and critical conceptualisation that focuses on ‘‘wherever there is political
organisation and participation’’ (p. 173). In Chapter 2, McDuie-Ra highlights
colonial perceptions of tribal as savage, exotic, and primitive that helped to produce
bounded categories of ‘‘tribe’’ vs ‘‘plains’’ and ‘‘tribes’’ vs ‘‘hill tribes’’ that
misrepresent the blurred boundaries that make tribal communities. Bounded
categories were germane to colonial extraction and exploitation and continue to
shape the complex and contradictory relations within and with the northeast –
processes of production, migration, segregation, protection and dispossession.
Going beyond representations of Indian state policies on the northeast as either
‘‘cosmetic federalism’’ or ‘‘cascaded autonomy’’, McDuie-Ra calls for concrete
attention to context and civil society since autonomy has complex faces and the lack
of autonomy is not the only grievance in the northeast.
124 Book Reviews

The inability to recognise other grievances results from the ‘‘outsider discourse’’
comprehensively outlined in Chapter 3. The pivotal distinction between ‘‘tribal’’ and
‘‘non-tribal’’ identity draws on categories inherited from colonial rule that remain
productive of rule, insecurities, and inequalities today. The author shows that
outsider discourse has successfully mobilised against the exclusionary effects of
neocolonial extraction in the case of uranium mining, linguistic imperialism, and the
influx of migrants who corner government employment and business opportunities.
The twist is that this discourse exacerbates state rule, human insecurity, and elite
reproduction of inequality, as often as it enables politicisation of identity insecurity.
While tribal elite privilege this discourse, as leaders of dorbars (councils), they also
gain from bribes from non-tribals who convert common land into private land. In
other words, tribal elite are battling ‘‘outsiders’’ while enabling the influx of those
outsiders considered beneficial (for example, workers in coal mines). Thus, McDuie-
Ra views identity insecurity as foregrounding ‘‘tribal’’ vulnerability to ‘‘non-tribal’’
politics and cultures rather than recognising other insecurities (such as environ-
mental, economic and gender insecurity) generated within tribal communities, by
their members. As such, the ‘‘outsider discourse’’ for mobilising human security is
captive to a colonial demarcation of the tribe as bounded culture, and depoliticises
economic, environmental and gender insecurities.
Chapters 4 and 5 focus on environmental insecurity and gender security
respectively to further deconstruct the political economy of the ‘‘outsider discourse’’.
In Chapter 4, the author asks why civil society actors have mobilised against
uranium mining but neglected other threats of environmental degradation such as
coal mining. Rather than view tribal people as homogenous carriers of premodern
sustainability, McDuie-Ra draws on critical scholarship on environmental politics in
India to argue that particular forms of environmental degradation get politicised as
insecurity while others do not. The voluble movement against uranium mining
foregrounds the problem of migrant workers and the fact that revenues and benefits
will flow out of Meghalaya. On the other hand, the visible degradation caused by
coal mining faces political neglect because the beneficiaries are Khasi elite,
Meghalaya state government, and landless Khasis dispossessed (ironically) due to
environmental degradation and unviable agrarian futures.
Chapter 5 calls attention to another site of insecurity rendered ‘‘invisible’’ by the
outsider discourse. Deconstructing the prevailing myth of empowered tribal women
that mistakes matriliny for matriarchy and disregards clan exogamy as constitutive of
community boundaries (p. 124), McDuie-Ra draws attention to multiple insecurities
faced by women – landlessness, feminisation of agricultural labour, exclusion from
political representation in traditional councils, and violence. These two chapters
show how privileging identity insecurity constrains the possibilities of a dynamic view
of multiple sources of insecurity. McDuie-Ra highlights an important public rally
that linked various ethnicities to mobilise against violence against women and for
political representation. Through this key example, the author argues for linking
actors within and beyond Meghalaya as a crucial mode of transcending constrained
politics in Meghalaya. Chapter 6 elaborates on the possibility of transcendence, and
makes a powerful case for ‘‘repoliticising’’ rather than ‘‘de-ethnicising’’ environ-
mental or gender insecurity, by taking into account who has ‘‘access to civil society’’
and ‘‘what constitutes insecurity and for whom’’ (p. 151, p. 169).
 Book Reviews 125

This is a well-organised, accessible book that addresses complex issues and

difficult concepts through clear cases in a border region with increasing political
import. However, it ought to be said in closing that the reader will miss the voices of
rural citizens. On the one hand, McDuie-Ra argues that rural citizens have limited
access to civil society even though they are crucially affected by environmental
security. Yet, despite his travels to villages in all four districts of the Khasi hills and
the fluidity of his definition of civil society, he has no interviews on what rural
citizens make of the limits and/or persuasiveness of the outsider discourse. The
possibility that rural citizens facing economic, environmental, and gender
insecurities are re-imagining politics beyond identity insecurity is not adequately
considered. Privileging visible politics in Shillong or by rural NGOs is important to
capture politics that has accomplished visibility, but it is inadequate for a long-term
view of invisible mobilisations and linkages that the author is otherwise attentive to
in the case of gender insecurity. Rural Meghalaya apart, Civil Society,
Democratization, and the Search for Human Security is a significant contribution
to thinking about insecurity and civil society in northeast India within and beyond
the purist categories of tribal and non-tribal.
DIA DA COSTA
Queen’s University, Canada
Ó 2011 Dia Da Costa

SIMONA SAWHNEY. The Modernity of Sanskrit. Minneapolis and London:

University of Minnesota Press, 2009. xi, 213 pp. A$39.95, paper.

Sawhney’s work is a necessary piece of scholarship, and will probably prove quite
significant. Sawhney asks ‘‘how we might read Sanskrit texts today, not to present a
hypothesis about how they might have been read two thousand years ago’’ (p. 15).
To this end, Sawhney does much to provide a much needed corrective to the
tendency for the study of Sanskrit to be viewed in isolation, all too focused on
religious and philosophical material and disengaged from larger trends in literary,
cultural and critical theory. Such isolation can only be, and perhaps has been,
detrimental to the study of Sanskrit itself, and has led to its virtual neglect on the
larger stage of world literature. As Sawhney suggests, the restriction of the study of
Sanskrit to a narrow field of specialists has meant that, beyond the academy,
Sanskrit has been either romanticised in a vague mysticism or, worse, enlisted to the
cause of nationalist hindutva – the two, of course, going hand in hand. The level of
critical rigour expected in the study of Sanskrit within the academy is counter-
balanced beyond the academy with a staggeringly, sometimes dangerously,
uncritical regard of the premodern Sanskrit world. Charting a course between
these two extremes, Sawhney seeks ‘‘to draw attention to the modernity that may yet
be possible for Sanskrit: a modernity in which it is neither neglected nor revered’’ (p.
17).
Sawhney develops a fascinating angle from which to understand the status of
Sanskrit itself. She points out that Sanskrit is defined against the vernacular
(prakrta) as a language characterised by its self-conscious cultivation (cf the idea of


Sanskrit itself as the language that is samskrta – ‘‘polished’’ or ‘‘refined’’). As ‘‘an


126 Book Reviews

essentially belated act of refinement, cultivation or consecration’’ (p. 8), Sanskrit has
prioritised the notion of ‘‘adornment’’ ( alamk ara) as both a literary motif and a
literary genre. Yet it has also claimed unique and privileged access to the primordial
and timeless. It is represented as both natural and an improvement upon the natural.
As Sawhney puts it, this tension has surfaced in ‘‘the concurrent valorization of both
the natural and the conquest of the natural . . . the mixed dread and envy of ‘natural’
passion; in the ambivalence toward asceticism’’ (p. 8) within the Sanskrit literary
and cultural milieu. Sawhney uses this tension to shape her analysis, concentrating
on ‘‘various engagements with the figures of the natural [and] spontaneous’’ by
focusing on the motifs of love, violence and poetry as areas that encapsulate
‘‘perhaps the most powerful fantasies of immediacy, both in Sanskrit literature and
modern readings of this literature’’ (p. 8).
Accordingly, Sawhney devotes much of her work to modern Indian readings of
Sanskrit literature. She elaborates that ‘‘[t]he ‘modernity’ of Sanskrit refers, first, to
the appearance and status of Sanskrit texts in modern India and to the ways in
which they have contributed to reflections on literary, political, and cultural
modernity’’ (p. 16). In this sense, the work as a whole is often more about modern
Hindi literature and its relation to the traditional past, its reception and
interpretation of Sanskrit literature, than it is about Sanskrit literature itself. This
may make the title of the work slightly misleading and may potentially mitigate
against it coming quite as directly to the attention of those readers who might
appreciate it most. Yet having said this, one of the strengths of Sawhney’s study is
that it exposes a wider English-language readership, and the world of comparative
literary studies, to modern Hindi literary criticism, such as the work of Hazariprasad
Dvivedi and Ram Chandra Shukla, as well as that of the dramatist Mohan Rakesh
and the poet Buddhadeva Bose. Sawhney also provides a stimulating analysis of
Gandhi and his reading of the Bhagavad Gıt a, her analysis of the notion of violence
allowing an effective means to draw out fresh insights into an area that has already
been well covered. But again, while this is relevant for Gandhi’s understanding of
tradition, it is somewhat tangential to the status of Sanskrit per se. At times, the
motif of ‘‘Sanskrit’’ itself appears somewhat weak as a link drawing these various
modern strands together. The implied premise seems to be that the very idea of
‘‘Sanskrit’’ stands for a certain ideologically charged and accepted traditional
account of India’s past. But the validity of this premise is not directly addressed.
Sawhney’s studies would stand well as independent essays, but the overall thematic
continuities are not always clear.
This could perhaps have been redressed by spending more time drawing out the
overarching motif of the aforementioned tension between the natural and the
conquest of the natural, the paradox of Sanskrit as both primordial and
‘‘consecrated’’, ‘‘refined’’ or ‘‘cultivated’’. For it could be noted that the very
understanding of such a dynamic as paradoxical seems itself to be a product of
modernity, and in fact it seems to be a paradox implicit in the project of modernity
itself in which timeless abstract principles such as reason, rationality, and scientific
and mathematical laws are both uncovered as natural on the one hand, and imposed
and formulated on the other. In modernity, it is a tension offset through the
siphoning of ‘‘cultivation’’ to scientific rationalism and historicist objectivity while
the natural or primordial is relegated to the realm of subjectivity and Romanticism.
 Book Reviews 127

The challenge for modernity has been how to reconcile these two extremes, and in
many ways the colonial and postcolonial Indian responses to the Sanskrit tradition
that Sawhney considers reflect this greater problematic. In other words, the tension
that Sawhney highlights is just as much one implicit in modernity as it is in the
Sanskrit worldview, and more clearly teasing out where one ends and the other
begins could have allowed for the thematic continuities to be more overtly set out
rather than remaining somewhat blurred.
Along similar lines, it would also have been useful to dwell more upon some of the
underlying theoretical assumptions of modernity and to compare them with those of
the Sanskritic worldview. Both modernity and the Sanskrit worldview see themselves
as providing, or at least as being capable of providing, a totalising discourse that it is
universal in scope, taming multiplicity by mapping out a finite set of controllable
abstract principles. Both assume an abstract reductionism. But rather than
the mathematical and scientific assumptions of Descartes and Newton, it is instead
the reductionism of Panini and the grammatical (vy akarana) tradition that shapes
the development of an, at times – like modernity – obsessive urge towards
taxonomies and categorisations: verbal roots operate as first principles; grammatical
and linguistic, rather than mathematical, analysis provides the tool-kit for
philosophical reasoning. Admittedly, perhaps all languages unconsciously assume
their own universal applicability. But perhaps no language does so as self-
consciously, with an abstract and theoretical linguistic blueprint so thoroughly
mapped out, as Sanskrit. It is a level of self-consciousness in its universal aspirations
in fact more reminiscent of the rise of scientific method itself. As Sawhney implies,
but in a move that could have been more clearly developed, ‘‘Sanskrit’’, in fact, may
provide a useful motif for unlocking certain shared assumptions implicit in both the
self-conscious construction of Brahmanical intellectual hegemony and the preten-
sions of the enlightenment project of modernity. Such a concentration on big picture
theoretical issues may have better brought some of the work’s many threads together
as well as lending further weight to the work’s explicit claim to track the ‘‘modernity
of Sanskrit’’ per se.
Nonetheless, Sawhney’s work is extremely welcome and timely. Her astute
application of the tools of critical theory and cultural studies will ensure continued
attention to Sanskrit literature, and will expose a sophisticated literary readership to
such seminal works as Kalidasa’s S´akuntal a and the Mah abharata, both of which
she addresses in some detail. However, perhaps her greater contribution is to also
highlight the rich traditions of Sanskrit and Hindi literary theory so as to draw
attention to the sophisticated contexts within which these works are embedded, thus
ensuring that Sanskrit literature is read critically and taken seriously, both on its
own terms and on a larger stage. As a last minor point, Sawhney’s prose can at times
seem overly laden with technical jargon from the area of critical theory and cultural
studies and, to my mind, this obscures the clarity of her argument. But then again, as
a Sanskritist myself, my own unease at this may itself be symptomatic of the very
problem of ‘‘Sanskrit isolationism’’ that Sawhney does so much to redress.

ANDREW MCGARRITY
The University of Sydney
Ó 2011 Andrew McGarrity
128 Book Reviews

ROCHONA MAJUMDAR. Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial

Bengal. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. 360 pp. US$89.95, hardcover;
US$24.95, paper.

Majumdar’s engaging and well-written study stages a provocative argument: that

arranged marriage and the joint Hindu family in India are modern historical forms.
Focusing on Bengali Hindus of the emergent professional and landed elite
(bhadralok) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Majumdar
persuasively demonstrates how colonial modernity occasioned fundamental debates
about and transformations in arranged marriage and the joint family. At the core of
this work is an argument concerning the historical plasticity and resilience of
arranged marriage and the Hindu joint family. Against a narrative of modernisation
as westernisation, in which an inevitable movement from status to contract brings in
its train the equally inevitable replacement of the joint family with the modern
nuclear family, Majumdar tracks ‘‘the historical processes through which the
institution of arranged marriage was reconstituted and rearranged under modern
conditions’’ (p. 2). Modern conditions produced transformations in the joint family,
but in no sense superseded it.
Majumdar has compiled a rich and unique archive of social memorabilia for this
project: family collections of wedding invitations, photographs, menu cards, poems,
jewellery catalogues and the like. She also draws upon autobiographies as well as
caste journals and other periodicals to offer something of the flavour of
contemporary social debate. This evocative collection of materials grounds some
of the strongest and most intriguing sections of the book, concerning late
nineteenth-century shifts in matchmaking practices, debates on the expansion of
dowry, and the emergence of a new discourse of taste. Majumdar highlights the
contours of critical shifts in arranged marriages and in wedding events in the
consolidation of this new social class: the replacement of the traditional
matchmaker/genealogist and the rise of matrimonial advertisements; a weakening
of concerns exclusively with caste and family background and the rise of new forms
of marital qualification, particularly educational and occupational attainments; the
massive inflation of dowry demands, or as she terms it, the market in grooms; the
concomitant emergence of new critiques both of dowry and of conspicuous
consumption in weddings; and likewise the emergence of new concerns with
sincerity, sentiment, and the educated performance of marriage rituals. At the same
time, what becomes apparent in her account is the extent to which it is a set of
debates concerning marriage, rather than specific changes therein, that characterises
the modernity of these forms. Thus, for example, both the expansion and the
rejection of dowry represent modern forms. Majumdar’s work confirms what many
scholars have identified as the development of a new form of patriarchy, centred
increasingly on the couple and on the authority of the husband, replacing the earlier
authority of male and female elders. Yet she extends this argument by emphasising
the ongoing prominence of the joint family, such that the conjugal couple was
valorised only insofar as it bolstered and was bolstered by the joint family.
Many of the chapters are organised around case studies, drawing upon key social
events to disentangle the issues and debates that marked a particular historical
moment. Throughout, the narrative is peppered with intriguing suggestions and
 Book Reviews 129

insights. These ideas often remain ungerminated, however, and at times the case
study approach seems to replace a more sustained historical and theoretical analysis.
This limitation seems particularly acute in the discussion of the historical expansion
of dowry, as well as in the two chapters of the book’s final section on law.
Nonetheless, Majumdar has offered a sharp and readable study that will provoke
interest and debate among historians of colonial and postcolonial India, feminist
scholars, and anyone interested in the complexities of global modernity.

RACHEL STURMAN
Bowdoin College
Ó 2011 Rachel Sturman

JAPAN
BARBARA MOLONY and KATHLEEN UNO (eds) Gendering Modern Japanese
History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005. 607 pp. US$25.00,
paper.

The appearance of Molony and Uno’s edited collection, Gendering Modern Japanese
History, reflects the fact that the inclusion of a gendered perspective on Japanese
history is no longer marginal to the ‘‘mainstream’’ concerns of the field. In their
introduction, the editors trace the shift from ‘‘women’s history’’, which was largely
focused on making women visible in the historical narrative, to ‘‘gender history’’,
which deploys ‘‘gender’’ as a major conceptual tool of analysis.
The contributors are mainly from universities in North America (with one Japan-
based and one UK-based contributor). They are thus largely speaking to the
concerns of the Asian Studies profession in the Anglophone academy. However, it is
worth noting that there has been a similar development of gender history within
Japan, with the creation in 2004 of the Gender History Association (Jend a Shi
Gakkai),1 an association that coexists with several associations devoted to women’s
history and women’s studies, not to mention the relatively new Japan Association
for Queer Studies (Kuia Gakkai, established in 2007).2
In focusing on ‘‘gender’’, the contributors to this volume are able to take
advantage of recent theoretical perspectives. This means interrogating both
femininity and masculinity and looking at their dynamic interaction; considering
sexuality alongside gender, class, ethnicity and other dimensions of difference; and
looking at both normative and non-normative sexualities.
In recent scholarship it has also been recognised that to study modernity it is
necessary to include a discussion of colonialism. Or, to borrow Tani E. Barlow’s
terminology, it is to recognise that modernity is necessarily understood as ‘‘colonial
modernity’’.3 The concerns of this volume thus extend beyond the borders of the
Japanese nation-state: to the peripheries, the treaty ports, the colonies and the
battlefields. It also means that the story includes the Okinawans and Ainu who were
incorporated into the Japanese nation-state in the late nineteenth century, as well as
colonial subjects in Korea, Taiwan, the Pacific and metropolitan Japan, and settlers
and subjects in the puppet-state of Manchukuo.
130 Book Reviews

‘‘Modern’’, for the purposes of this volume, is the period the editors call ‘‘the long
twentieth century’’: from the final years of the feudal regime of the Tokugawa
shogunate to the recent present. The thematic sections follow a roughly
chronological order, from Martha Tocco’s discussion of education for women in
late Tokugawa and early Meiji Japan to Setsu Shigematsu’s study of feminist
discourse in the mass media in late twentieth-century Japan. Most attention,
however, is focused on Imperial Japan (1890 to 1945), with only 3 of the 16 chapters
dealing with events after World War II.
The book is organised according to five main themes: ‘Gender, Selfhood, Culture’,
‘Gender, Bodies, Sexualities’, ‘Gender, Empire, War’, ‘Gender, Work, Economy’, and
‘Theorizing Gender’. It is also possible to track particular themes across these sections.
Those with an interest in masculinities can look at Donald Roden’s discussion of
the Meiji gentleman, Mark Driscoll’s study of the sexological thought of Mori
Rintar 
o (Ogai) and Miyatake Gaikotsu and Theodore Cook’s chapter on the
making of imperial soldiers. Femininity is, of course, still a major concern, and
changing constructions of femininity can be tracked from the late Tokugawa period
to the present, in the spheres of education, work, the home and the mass media, as
well as in Ayako Kano’s discussion of the trope of femininity in literary criticism.
Diverse sexualities can be tracked through Greg Pflugfelder’s chapter on same-sex
love among schoolgirls, Sumiko Otsubo’s discussion of marriage and eugenics, Setsu
Shigematsu’s discussion of ‘‘girls’ comics’’ and ‘‘ladies’ pornography’’ and Driscoll’s
abovementioned chapter. The history of feminism can be followed in Molony’s
chapter on turn-of-the-century debates on women’s rights and the chapters by
Otsubo and Shigematsu. Colonial modernity is treated in Barbara Brooks’ chapter
on bourgeois civility in Korea and Manchuria, Donald Smith’s chapter on Korean
women in the mining industry, and again in Driscoll’s chapter.
This substantial volume could stand alone as a textbook for a specialised seminar on
gender and history in Japan, but individual chapters will surely also be used in various
courses on Asian Studies, Japanese Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Notes
1. See http://wwwsoc.nii.ac.jp/gendershi/Enindex.html, last accessed 2 July 2010.
2. http://queerjp.org/, last accessed 2 July 2010.
3. Tani E. Barlow, ‘Introduction’, in Tani E. Barlow (ed.) Formations of Colonial Modernity in East
Asia. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997, pp. 1–20.

VERA MACKIE
University of Wollongong
Ó 2011 Vera Mackie

MARK McLELLAND, KATSUHIKO SUGANUMA AND JAMES WELKER

(eds) Queer Voices from Japan: First-Person Narratives from Japan’s Sexual
Minorities. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. 356 pp. US$36.00, paper.

In the field of queer studies, much has been written over the past decade
regarding the manner by which a range of sexual cultures are both exposed to
 Book Reviews 131

and concomitantly act as an integral part of various globalisation processes.

Many of the approaches to this type of query have tried to understand local
appropriation and incorporation of apparently western-style concepts such as gay
rights and identity ideologies within the larger structures of new media
technology and late-capitalist flows of commodities and people. Much of the
discourse surrounding this dynamic has been written within the analytic
framework that argues for a ‘‘globalisation of sexuality’’ in which non-western
gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered communities more or less ‘‘borrow’’
originally western-style identities and cultures. This line of thinking is
problematic on many levels, not the least of which is that it imagines the local
and the global as abstract and de-territorialised entities following pre-determined
global circuits.
As a corrective, many critics have suggested that a more careful reading must be
made of the complicated linkages between and across cultures, and recognise that in
many instances there has been, at best, a selective re-appropriation of western terms
and concepts within non-western sexual cultures. Queer Voices from Japan speaks
directly to this issue through its distinctly different approach to non-normative
Japanese sexualities and genders through its considered use of non-Anglophone
sources including archival materials, memoirs, roundtable discussions, archives and
interviews. The editors utilise these first-person narratives of lived sexual experience
and desire, many translated into English for the first time, to ‘‘give some sense of
(the) long history of development and at least gesture toward the wide variety of
subject positions and experiences that have been given voice by members of ‘non-
standard’ sexual minorities in Japan’’ (p. 2).
The text opens with a comprehensive introduction aptly titled ‘Re(claiming)
Japan’s Queer Past’, in which the editors present a brief yet necessary historical
review of the archipelago’s queer cultures. In the process of outlining this history,
they pay particular attention to the evolution of the types of local and regional
language utilised by persons inhabiting these cultures and as such emphasise the
notion that in many instances the borrowing and adapting of terms and concepts is
not necessarily limited to those found in western languages. Here, as with the rest of
the volume, the influence of the global is certainly acknowledged, yet the material is
all rooted firmly in the local.
The material subsequently presented in this volume spans the 1920s to the present
and includes both urban and rural narratives. Chapter 1 sets the tone for the rest of
the volume with an account of a 1987 interview, by activist and writer Sawabe
Hitomi, with Yuasa Yoshiko, a ‘‘dandy’’ scholar born in the Meiji Era. Chapters 2
to 8 cover the period from the 1920s to the 1950s, and Chapters 9 to 21 the 1950s to
the present. The range of topics and contexts is broad and covers, among other
things, life in the Imperial army, hustlers, histories of gay and lesbian bars and
neighbourhoods, a history of the first lesbian organisation in Japan, and reflections
on a recent Tokyo lesbian and gay parade. It should be noted that, unlike in other
recent volumes, transgender lives and lesbian homosexuality are not merely an
afterthought; they are given equal attention and the lives of the individuals who
share their stories are brought sharply into focus.
Overall, with Queer Voices from Japan, the editors are quite successful in
bringing the reader into the complex world of sexual minorities in Japan through
132 Book Reviews

their use of narratives that are fluid, multivocal and dynamic. In the introductory
chapter, the editors put forth a goal of ‘‘draw(ing) attention to the vast and so-
far underutilized body of material that exists in the hope that others will be
inspired to make more of this history available’’ (p. 5). By utilising a wide-
ranging and important set of materials that have never before been translated or
widely disseminated they accomplish this goal and offer a much-needed
contribution to the fields of Japanese studies, gender studies, and non-
Anglophone queer studies.

ROBERT F. PHILLIPS
University of Wollongong
Ó 2011 Robert F. Phillips

MIKE DANAHER. Environmental Politics in Japan: The Case of Wildlife

Preservation. Saarbrucken, Germany: VDM Verlag Dr. Muller, 2008. 379 pp.
US$122.00, paper.

In 2009, Richard O’Barry documented the capture and slaughter of bottlenose

dolphins in Taiji, Japan; his award-winning documentary The Cove used hidden,
camouflaged cameras to uncover what he argued was a secret kept even from many
Japanese citizens. This book – a slightly reworked version of the author’s 2004 PhD
dissertation for Griffith University – seeks to untangle a related environmental
paradox. Japan has successfully controlled domestic pollution problems and made
far-ranging advances in energy efficiency, while at the same time it has been labelled
an ‘‘environmental predator’’ due to its trading in and heavy use of endangered
wildlife products (such as blue fin tuna, ivory and hawksbill turtle shells), import of
rainforest timber, support for whaling and the killing of dolphins, and use of driftnet
fishing. That is, Japan has an excellent record in many areas related to the
environment, but a very poor one in wildlife preservation. Why hasn’t Japan been
able to accede on a wide range of environmental concerns, especially given
international pressure on issues such as whaling, ivory, and the preservation of
wildlife habitats?
Through an investigation of Japan’s participation in two international regimes –
the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and
Flora (CITES) and the Ramsar Convention – Danaher tests arguments initially
made by Frances Rosenbluth (1989) in the field of financial politics about the need
for powerful domestic lobbies in order to catalyse international pressure. He
argues that the core reason for Japan’s poor record in wildlife preservation rests in
the marginalisation of environmental nongovernmental organisations (ENGOs)
and pro-environmental government agencies from the policy-making process.
Danaher finds evidence that the Iron Triangle of the long-ruling Liberal
Democratic Party (LDP), insulated central government bureaucrats, and large
businesses and corporations is very much intact and has out-manoeuvred
supporters of wildlife preservation (World Wildlife Fund Japan, Wild Bird Society
of Japan, and so forth) and the fledgling Ministry of the Environment. ‘‘Both
conservative politicians and business leaders were moving to pre-empt any further
 Book Reviews 133

public dissatisfaction and protest at the international and domestic levels toward
their records on environmental issues’’ (p. 63). The power elite has successfully
framed much of the discussion about the environment in terms of resource use,
and this has hamstrung the work of activists who envision wildlife and habitats as
having broader psychological, cultural and personal value. Invoking Robert
Putnam’s theory of two-level games, Danaher sees Japanese negotiators as
simultaneously handling domestic and international pressures, and follows the
work of Leonard Schoppa who, like Rosenbluth, emphasised the need for
domestic audience pressure in order for foreign pressure (gaiatsu) to be effective.
For scholars seeking a historical overview of environmental policy-making, the
book has some able summaries of 40 years of activities by the government, along
with rich details on the activities of Japanese NGOs in these international
environmental regimes. Danaher’s description of the weaknesses of these NGOs
until the late 1990s meshes well with previous research by scholars such as Robert
Pekkanen. However, newer research by Kim Reimann (2006) suggests that the
strength of NGOs in Japan needs to be re-evaluated due to new norms and
institutional structures that have expanded their reach. Furthermore, with the rise of
the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in recent elections, future research may
find more room for environmentally-focused lobbying in Kasumigaseki and Nagata-
cho (the areas of Tokyo where bureaucrats and politicians are most concentrated).
Much of the original data on which Danaher bases his arguments comes from
interviews in the late 1990s with the staff of four environmental NGOs, along with
other Japanese actors such as civil servants; it would have been helpful to know
exactly how many interviews were conducted over the course of the project. I would
also have liked to hear more about case selection; the author recognises the
potentially tremendous gap between efforts at global environmental protection and
stewardship of local, domestic environments (p. 342), but says little more about the
use of two international regimes as a lens for study.
Regrettably, due to the high price of this book, I cannot recommend its
purchase or use in classrooms. However, scholars interested in benefiting from
Danaher’s intensive case studies could access the original dissertation. Danaher’s
work on state–civil society interaction meshes well with new research by Simon
Avenell (2010) and provides more evidence for the importance of approaching
Japanese politics with an eye towards institutions, interests and ideas, and not
merely culture.

References
Simon Avenell, Making Japanese Citizens: Civil Society and the Mythology of the Shimin in Postwar Japan.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
Kim Reimann, A View from the Top: International Politics, Norms and the Worldwide Growth of
NGOs. International Studies Quarterly 50(1), 2006, pp. 45–67.
Frances Rosenbluth, Financial Politics in Contemporary Japan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1989.

DANIEL P. ALDRICH
Purdue University
Ó 2011 Daniel P. Aldrich
134 Book Reviews

BASIL ARCHER. Interpreting Occupied Japan: The Diary of an Australian Soldier

1945–1946, edited and with an introduction by Sandra Wilson. Carlisle, WA:
Hesperian Press, 2009. 128 pp. A$25.00, paper.

Once a neglected footnote to World War II, the Australian contribution to the
American-led Occupation of Japan has attracted scholarly attention in recent years.
No doubt the acutely controversial engagement in Iraq has spurred the surge of
interest in the politics and practices of military occupations, especially in those
where Australia engages in a dutifully subsidiary role to the United States.
Yet Australia’s part in the Japanese theatre was more than merely walk-on. An
accumulated total of over 20,000 Australians served in postwar Japan, many of
them ensconced with their families in colonial-style enclaves, with the penurious
occupied peoples at their beck and call. Moreover, the Occupation lasted longer
than the war itself. While its role was small compared with that of the dominant
Amercians, Australia’s leadership of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force –
in operational control of a combined force including British, Indians and New
Zealanders – indicated a new self-assertiveness in national military and foreign
relations, and signalled a resolve to shape the postwar future of the Asia-Pacific,
albeit in geopolitical conformity with the views of the US. Equally importantly, the
Occupation occasioned a first-hand cultural encounter between two peoples who
had recently been at each other’s throats. That the Australians were based in
Hiroshima Prefecture, within cooee of the atom-bombed city, lent a piquancy to the
encounter. From the Australian point of view, what transpired in postwar Japan was
to prove a watershed in relations with its region.
The literature of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force – ‘‘BCOF’’ – is
marked mainly by various kinds of personal narrative, plus a few novels, most
notably T.A.G. Hungerford’s Sowers of the Wind (1954), which provided a
jaundiced view of the Australians in Japan and of the corruptive enterprise of
occupation itself. But most of these are retrospective accounts, writes the Perth
academic Sandra Wilson in her excellent Introduction to Basil Archer’s Interpreting
Occupied Japan, the diary of a young Australian who served as an interpreter with
BCOF. They are inevitably distorted by memory and often shaped by a
determination to argue the case for the achievements and travails of a body of
men collectively known as the ‘‘Forgotten Force’’.
Thus Basil Archer’s diary is indeed a ‘‘unique’’ BCOF document (as Wilson
claims), and an invaluably immediate account. A linguist engaged in intelligence
work for the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre, he worked at the
cutting edge of engagement with a still despised and distrusted enemy. Aided by
Wilson’s polished editing, Interpreting Occupied Japan is a substantial historical
document. Archer, Wilson remarks, was an ‘‘unlikely’’ military linguist. Born
outside Perth in 1921, he trained in gold assaying at the Perth Technical College,
before joining a coastal artillery searchlight unit in 1941. Responding in 1943 to an
army call to apply to learn Japanese – there was an urgent need for service personnel
who could communicate in the language of the antagonist – he was eventually
accepted into the RAAF Language School as the vicious fighting in the Asia-Pacific
was about to reach its stunningly abrupt conclusion. In December 1945 he found
himself on the sweltering Moluccan island of Morotai, practising his Japanese on
 Book Reviews 135

prisoners of war awaiting repatriation. In February 1946 he arrived on the first

convoy of the Australian contingent into the shattered naval depot Kure, just down
the coast from Hiroshima, into one of the bitterest Japanese winters in history, and
into the most ravaged areas of war-devastated Japan.
The edited diary’s title, Interpreting Occupied Japan, is clearly apposite, though it
promises rather more than it delivers. This is a relatively reticent, guarded
document, especially when compared with the work of a fellow interpreter, Alan
Clifton’s Time of Fallen Blossoms, published in 1950 while the Occupation was still
going, and a devastating if highly coloured account of some of the worst excesses of
Australian misbehaviour in Japan, in lording it brutally over a vanquished enemy –
rampant black marketeering, and various forms of often drunken violence, including
pack rape. With good cause, Archer is proud of the work he did in helping to get
Japan back on its feet, and too loyal to be too critical. Yet he does acknowledge the
‘‘crook behaviour’’ of some countrymen. ‘‘The Australians,’’ he wrote in March
1946, ‘‘are no worse than any of the Allies, but still it is no excuse for some very
disgusting behaviour. Japanese are a little bewildered about it all as it isn’t much
improvement on what they have been used to’’.
The latter comment serves as a bracing reminder of the cons as well as the pros of
the Occupation. Otherwise, Interpreting Occupied Japan is a welcome case study of a
modest, dedicated young Australian of the wartime generation engaged in the day-
to-day business of coming to terms with a once-hated people, and helping forge new
paths forward – for both Japanese and Australians.

ROBIN GERSTER
Monash University
Ó 2011 Robin Gerster

WALTER A. SKYA. Japan’s Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shinto

Ultranationalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009. 400 pp.
US$25.95, paper.

The target design on the front cover of Walter A. Skya’s Japan’s Holy War does not
necessarily have a strong impact at first glance, but leaves a lingering image. Readers of
the book are later informed that the design is an illustration of Shinto cosmology
drawn in the early twentieth century by Kakehi Katsuhiko, a scholar of law and Shinto
classics who ‘‘was fond of diagrams’’ (p. 220). Right in the centre of the target sits the
Emperor. He is surrounded by ‘‘the spirits of the imperial ancestors’’ and Amaterasu
Omikami, a goddess who, according to an ancient myth, is the original ancestor of the
imperial family. Other important gods and goddesses in Japanese mythology follow
them. Skya’s work reveals the process of creating an extreme ideology that enabled
Shinto, a nation-building project and the Emperor system, which is symbolised in the
target design, to merge and lead Japan into that foolish war.
The book is unique as the focus is not on politicians or military officers as per
usual, but on scholars who helped shape dominant political thought in Japan from
the Meiji Restoration to the lead-up to the war in Asia and the Pacific. Transitions
of thought regarding the state, supposedly based on a constitution, its nationals and
136 Book Reviews

the Emperor, are carefully traced by examining the theories of scholars and thinkers
such as Hozumi Yatsuka, Kita Ikki, Uesugi Shinkichi and Kakehi Katsuhiko, who
were highly influential in forging Japanese ultranationalism, as well as Minobe
Tatsukichi, who was a liberal figure and an opponent of the ideas of those
ultranationalists. Although the question of why Japan threw itself into that war
remains, Japan’s Holy War is an informative text about early modern Japan.
However, the most intriguing aspect of Skya’s work lies in a slightly different
place. Paradoxically enough, the more you turn the pages of Japan’s Holy War, the
more the question of ‘‘the West’’ arises. It is probably not a coincidence that I
occasionally recalled Edward W. Said’s voice while going through this book, and the
author refers to both Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis – two American
scholars Said categorised as ‘‘Orientalists’’ and criticised for stimulating the division
between the West and the rest until his death.
Said once gave a speech in Tokyo titled ‘Clash of Culture or Clash of Definitions?’,
which was obviously a counter argument to Huntington’s widely read and popular
article ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’. In the speech, Said condemned Huntington and
Lewis for taking separation between the West and the East for granted and treating
the West as one solid entity without any examination. By doing so, he brought the
audience’s attention to the need to question ‘‘the West’’. Interestingly, a reading of
Japan’s Holy War similarly generates such attention and makes the problem of ‘‘the
West’’, which has overwhelming and mysterious power over the rest, visible.
Skya observes that radical Shinto ultranationalism in Japan emerged and
developed as a form of resistance to Western civilisation. This is clear in his
‘Introduction’, where he quotes Huntington’s view that recognises the current
Islamic fundamentalist movement as resistance to the West and compares it to the
rise of ultranationalism in prewar Japan (pp. 2–3). Yet the Japanese intellectuals
Skya examines in this work seem to me to all be fairly ‘‘Western’’. They were
educated in the West and introduced Western theories to defend their ultra-
nationalist ideas. This rather ironic and almost pitiful situation for the Japanese
ultranationalists indicates the extent of domination of knowledge by the West. Does
not thinking about Japan’s deep dependency on the West lead us to think that even
Japanese radical Shinto ultranationalism, which condemned and opposed the West,
was the very creation of the West? Was it not an idea that was incubated within the
West? Or is this too radical a way of reading this book?
It was probably not intended, but Japan’s Holy War provides a chance to
contemplate notions of ‘‘the West’’. A question such as ‘‘is the West really a ‘secular’
place?’’ should be asked. And the division between Western scholarship (mainly
American) and Japanese scholarship within Japanese studies, which is suggested by
Skya’s frequent mention of the importance of his study in filling a gap in Western
scholarship, needs to be eliminated to obtain the whole picture of Japan’s war in
Asia and the Pacific.

References
S. Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs. Summer, 1993. Available at http://www.
foreignaffairs.org/19930601faessay5188/samuel-p-huntington/the-clash-of-civilizations.html, acces-
sed 9 February 2009.
 Book Reviews 137

E.W. Said, ‘Clash of Culture or Clash of Definitions?’, International Mecenat Conference ’95, Complete
Proceedings. Tokyo: Kigyo Mecenat Kyogikai, 1995, pp. 29–40.

YOKO HARADA
Deakin University
Ó 2011 Yoko Harada

TAKERO DOI AND TOSHIHIRO IHORI. The Public Sector in Japan: Past
Developments and Future Prospects. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2009. xii, 320
pp. £85.00, hardcover.

With the backdrop of an alarmingly high level of Japanese government debt, the
Hatoyama administration openly examined government spending programs in
2009 – a fresh initiative that was generally welcomed by Japanese taxpayers. Given
this relevance, public finance in Japan would be topical for a course on the
Japanese economy. A challenge for teaching economic analyses of public policy in
English, however, has been the lack of an English-language book that covers
contemporary issues; Doi and Ihori, who are authors of Japanese-language
textbooks on public economics, have now provided a convenient reference on
Japanese government finance in English. The authors have selected a good range
of contemporary topics suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses
on the Japanese economy. This book begins with a brief history of government
finance after World War II, and presents economic analyses centring on themes of
ageing population, government debt, local government finance, and decentralisa-
tion. The book consists of 10 stand-alone chapters, most of which are structured
to introduce current policy settings, present empirical/theoretical analyses, and
offer policy recommendations.
The book covers an impressive range of institutions and would be useful for
economic analyses of Japanese public policies. The topics include the central and
local government budgets, the Fiscal Investment and Loan Program (or the
‘‘second budget’’), central and local taxes, public social security, pensions, and
more. In particular, Chapter 10, the final chapter, has a concise and sometimes
delightful account of the FILP reform and postal savings. The empirical analyses
utilise aggregate data to understand economy-wide phenomena, such as the
estimation of the productivity of different types of public capital (e.g. roads,
railways, dams), the evaluation of the prudency of government spending
behaviour, and the soft budget problem present in local government spending.
Given the emphasis on macro-level analysis, readers will not find microecono-
metric analyses of welfare programs in this book, but given the depth of analyses
in other parts this lack of coverage is sensible. Theoretical analyses include a
model to evaluate the intergenerational conflict and pensions policy; a dynamic
model to analyse the efficiency of taxes; the soft budget problems of local
government; and a model of central and local governments to analyse policy
options (e.g. transfer of tax base from central to local government). The
economic methods covered in this book are well-established tools in the
economist’s toolbox, and it is designed to foster an understanding of those
138 Book Reviews

economic methodologies while informing about current issues in Japanese public

finance.
A central theme in this book is Japanese government debt – an important
policy issue because how we understand the seriousness of this indebtedness
affects the degree of expenditure cuts to healthcare for the elderly, for example.
The authors advocate that ‘‘we should pursue the fiscal reconstruction as soon as
possible’’ (p. 18), implying that expenditure cuts and tax hikes are necessary. In a
revisionist article, Broda and Weinstein (2005) argue that the debt is not as
serious as has been typically thought, based on evidence such as low yields on
Japanese government bonds (JGB) and the level of net debt being comparable
with other OECD countries. This academic debate would make an interesting
lecture topic but the alternative view, along with existing projections of debt-to-
GDP ratio from previous studies, receives, I felt, insufficient coverage in Chapter
9; Broda and Weinstein (2005) would be a good complementary reading on this
topic.
The strength of this book, however, is in documenting a wide array of
institutional details that are sometimes difficult to obtain. Table 9.1 shows
the composition of JGB holders, indicating that as much as 44.3% of JGB in
2006 were held by public financial institutions, a fact that seems not to be well
known outside Japan; Broda and Weinstein (2005) in footnote 2 indicate
that they were not able to locate the information on JGB holders. While the
book does not elaborate on the effects of this strikingly large holding of
marketable bonds by the public sector, this fact calls into question the
standard interpretation of the low yield on JGB. Doi-Ihori and Broda-Weinstein
interpret the low yield on JGB as reflecting the fact that ‘‘investors are optimistic
about the future of Japan’s fiscal system’’ (p. 298). Alternatively, the JGB yield
might be low partly because the Japanese government has been successful in
channelling public funds to buy up its own debt. In short, the chapters on
government debt would serve as excellent introductory reading materials for class
discussion.
While Ishi (2005) provides more thorough treatment of Japanese taxes and some
parts of this book may not be as reader-friendly as they could be, on the whole the
book offers an in-depth reference for many of the new Japanese legal institutions,
and is a recommended reference for advanced undergraduate and graduate students,
university researchers, economists, and journalists who are interested in public
finance issues in Japan today.

References
C. Broda and D.E. Weinstein, Happy News from the Dismal Science: Reassessing Japanese Fiscal Policy
and Sustainability. NBER Working Paper No. 10988, 2004.
H. Ishi, The Japanese Tax System. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

KAZUKI ONJI
Australian National University
Ó 2011 Kazuki Onji
 Book Reviews 139

LAM PENG ER. Japan’s Peace-building Diplomacy in Asia: Seeking a More Active
Political Role. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. 171 pp. Notes,
bibliography, index. US$150.00, hardcover.

This volume – the tenth in Routledge’s ‘Security in the Asia Pacific’ Series – portrays
peace-building as Japan’s ‘‘new pillar’’ of foreign policy, one whose contribution to
intra-state and, therefore, regional security in the Asia Pacific since the 1990s, Er
argues, has often been overlooked due to longstanding perceptions of Japan’s
passivity and reactivity in international affairs since World War II.
Peace-building for Japan has generally meant extensive pre-, mid- and post-
conflict diplomacy (including the hosting of negotiations and conferences),
significant official development assistance, and other arrangements, such as support
for the United Nations Peace-building Commission. However, Japan’s approach is
often different from those of similarly-engaged bodies and countries in that it is
almost exclusively predicated on economic strength. Indeed, Japan is unable to use
its (comparatively good) military strength in any substantive way to coerce or
enforce peace or even to deploy the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) on overseas missions,
such as the establishment of a United Nations Peacekeeping Operation or disaster
relief, unless an appropriate legal framework or special legislation is in place.
After an overview of the emergence of peace-building as a foreign policy concept
in Japan, the volume contains specific case studies of Japanese peace-building efforts
in Cambodia, East Timor, Aceh, Mindanao and Sri Lanka, three of which are
revised versions of earlier journal articles. In each case, the studies are primarily
about official Japanese peace-building, although the activities of some nongovern-
mental organisations are mentioned, particularly when they come into conflict with
official policy. Although the omission of studies of Japanese involvement in
international interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq may seem glaring, this was a
deliberate choice by Er, who explains that those places were not examples of civil
war, as were the others, and that Japan has not been playing a diplomatic role in
ending conflicts in those places.
In each case, Er assesses whether Japan’s peace-building efforts can be considered
as a success for Japan and also for the recipient areas and peoples involved.
Cambodia and East Timor receive a qualified ‘‘yes’’, for example, while Mindanao
and Sri Lanka receive a ‘‘no’’. It quickly becomes obvious that Er is a gentle critic of
what he sees as Japan’s lost opportunities, which have arisen in his view out of the
‘‘strict legalism’’ of constitutional interpretation and the ‘‘dovishness’’ of the
Japanese people, who have been generally unwilling to support the SDF being
deployed to places of risk. He is also critical of the weakness of Japan’s political and
intellectual leadership (apart from UN veterans Ogata Sadako and Akashi Yasushi,
and then Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichir o), whom he describes as being easily
distracted by domestic concerns. Er mentions, but appears to be less critical of, the
way in which Japanese peace-building policy-makers have sometimes chosen to
overlook human rights abuses, or widespread corruption by some of those with
whom they deal, or how they have been influenced by external economic and
strategic factors. Japan’s peace-building in Aceh, for example, was affected by the
need not to offend Indonesia, an important economic partner; by the presence of
140 Book Reviews

strategic gas and oil reserves in Aceh; and by Aceh’s proximity to the Straits of
Malacca, through which a great deal of Japan’s energy supply passes. It is, therefore,
sometimes hard to reconcile Japan’s political, economic and strategic pragmatism
with its rhetoric of commitment to human-centred, not state-centred, peace-
building.
This is a well-researched book, as evidenced by the extensive notes and
bibliography which, at 50 pages, form just under a third of the slender volume. It
provides intriguing insights into Japanese perceptions of the peace-building role
that Japan can take in the region; however, it also shows the success Japan has
had in promoting its institutionalisation of and engagement with that role. Er
describes Japan’s decision to incorporate peace-building into its foreign policy, for
example, as ‘‘impressive’’ and ‘‘laudable’’. Indeed, he concludes that Japan is ‘‘an
exceptional Asian country [in] seeking to end civil wars and reconstruct wartorn
nations’’. On reading this volume, however, it is impossible to escape the
conclusion that Japan’s peace-building – at least on the broad, national level and
not on the personal, individual or nongovernmental organisation level – is often as
much about carefully establishing Japan’s identity as an ‘‘active and positive
‘peace-loving’ country’’ that is ‘‘acceptable to its citizens and Asian neighbours’’ as
it is about the outcome of peace. Uncomfortably, Er tends to inadvertently
support this conclusion by judging Japanese peace-building against the efforts of
others. Japan’s ‘‘peace-making role’’ in Aceh, for example, was in Er’s view
ultimately ‘‘snatched . . . from its hands’’ by Finland. Surely, if the ultimate, albeit
idealistic, goal is peace, then this point-scoring rhetoric should be avoided?
Nonetheless, this is an interesting book on an area of Japanese policy-making
likely to interest readers from many disciplines.

NARRELLE MORRIS
The University of Melbourne
Ó 2011 Narrelle Morris

MICHAEL COMO. Weaving and Binding: Immigrant Gods and Female Immortals in
Ancient Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009. 306 pp. US$48.00,
hardcover.

Few authors deserve to be described as having produced a book that is a tour de

force in erudition, but this is one of them. Michael Como claims three goals for
Weaving and Binding: to draw attention to (1) the importance of imported
continental technologies and the Chinese ritual calendar in the development of
purportedly indigenous Japanese practices and beliefs; (2) the role of gender issues
in economic and cultic systems in ancient Japan; and (3) the influence of these two
factors on the emergence of Buddhism in Japan (pp. xii–xiii). By so doing, he sets
out to debunk the dualistic views of ancient Japan that became axiomatic from the
late nineteenth century on. These premises include the view that cultural and
political diffusion was largely a one-way street from the Yamato hegemony out to
the provinces; that the myths, cultural tropes, practices and beliefs from the sixth
century onward that were not overtly continental and recent in provenance, such
 Book Reviews 141

as Buddhism, governance and legal reforms, must necessarily have been

‘‘native’’ to Japan; and that continental immigrants were utilised by the
Yamato-based court but that the royal family itself was ‘‘purely’’ Japanese. Como
ambitiously but successfully attempts to refute these long-held assumptions, by
tracing the complicated interwoven mesh of immigrant genealogies, their fields of
hereditary expertise, their geographical distribution, their myths of origin, and the
relationships that bind them each to the other and to the newly formed Japanese
state.
Como’s analysis is based on a wide range of sources – not merely the oft-cited
early eighth-century national chronicles Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, but many that are
less well known, especially in the English literature on the topic. He looks beyond
the Japanese texts to locate influential passages from Chinese and Korean classics,
with what appears to be easy familiarity. The result is a tightly packed exegesis that
adds to the growing corpus of scholarly work both in Japan and elsewhere that has
been overturning the prewar legacy of nativist and nationalist and ultranationalist
interpretations of prehistory, proto-history and the ancient historical periods in
Japan.
The chief case studies of the book deal with the Hata kinship group who, the
ancient records claim, were originally from the ancient Korean kingdom of Silla.
They were said to be prominent in the introduction of sericulture to Japan, which
as Como notes, went on to become virtually currency-in-kind and to form one of
the bases of economic power. He analyses a range of myths in which a motif
related to sericulture or textile production appears, and traces their relationships
to the Hata and other immigrant families from the Korean peninsula.
The very name Hata is a homonym of ‘‘loom’’. In this connection we learn
that spinning and weaving were the preserve of women, though Como offers no
exploration of why that was so. Rather, his focus is on the effect that this gender
division of labour had upon pre-Buddhist beliefs, particularly with regard to the
prominence of female deities. He argues persuasively that it is not a question of
continental immigrant Buddhist beliefs supplanting native Japanese ‘‘Shinto’’
beliefs in the late seventh century (as the accepted scholarly canon claims), but
rather a question of Buddhist factions prevailing over those who held folk beliefs.
He emphasises that those folk beliefs were not in fact all indigenously ‘‘Japanese’’
but were an amalgam of preexisting Japanese folk religion overlain with the
whole gamut of contemporary Chinese and Korean folk beliefs that included
Daoism, the Chinese ritual calendar and ancestor worship. Como links all these
‘‘threads’’ to the rise of the Amaterasu sun worship cult and its adoption by the
court at Asuka. Further, throughout he emphasises that all these aspects became
sufficiently rooted to have long-term effects on the interplay between religion,
politics and government for some centuries afterwards, and were much more
influential in shaping the future course of Japanese history and culture than has
hitherto been recognised. To summarise, this is a landmark book that is a
valuable addition to the scholarly literature in English on ancient Japan.

EDWINA PALMER
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Ó 2011 Edwina Palmer
142 Book Reviews

KOREA
HWASOOK NAM. Building Ships, Building a Nation: Korea’s Democratic Unionism
under Park Chung Hee. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2009.
372 pp. US$35.00, paper.

Of the many contributing factors that enabled the success of the East Asian Newly
Industrialised Countries, heavily controlled labour movements were perhaps as
important as a single-minded pursuit of high growth economies led by authoritarian
developmental states. The history of labour movements in Korea is one of the most
intriguing, not least because it had the most militant labour unionism in the region,
followed by an extensive period of institutional taming and the re-emergence of
labour militancy. This book is about the dramatic rise and fall of labour unionism in
Korea from the immediate postwar years to the end of the Park Chung Hee regime
(1961–79).
Korea had the most highly mobilised left in the region upon liberation in 1945,
but its leftist elements were heavily suppressed during the American occupation and
under successive authoritarian governments. In the standard view, labour unions
were consistently suppressed throughout the Park regime, and postcolonial legacies
of labour unionism were only negative, contributing to inactivity and compliance.
Against this, the author argues that labour unions and their ideals up to the period
of the early 1970s were much more progressive than is typically believed. Although
their struggles for rights, dignity and democracy ended in defeat, labour
mobilisation during the postcolonial period successfully pushed the first government
of Syngman Rhee to legislate a fairly progressive constitutional framework
guaranteeing labour rights in 1953. There were significant implementation problems
with these laws in practice. Yet this legal framework allowed future workers to
pursue legitimate labour struggles. Contrary to the conventional view, also, the
authoritarian military regime of Park was remarkably tolerant of labour militancy at
least during the first half of its rule. The formation of labour unionism inherited
from the postcolonial period contributed greatly to this progressive unionism, the
legacies of which were eventually translated into Korea’s dramatic transition to
democracy in the late 1980s.
The author explores this historical development by unpacking the inner
workings as well as the attitudes, perceptions and behaviours of the then largest
shipyard in Korea, the Korea Shipbuilding and Engineering Corporation, the
predecessor of today’s Hanjin Heavy Industries. This is an impressive piece of
research. The extensive consultation of a large volume of archival records
provides a rich source of historical narratives regarding postwar labour history in
Korea.
However, those who are interested in the ‘‘explanatory accounts’’ of the rise
and fall of labour unionism and the shift in its ideational orientation may find
this book only half satisfying. This is largely because the author is never explicit
about her theoretical positioning. There is some gesturing to an institutional
approach, suggesting that ‘‘institutional memories’’ play a significant role in
accounting for institutional continuity and change. Yet this remains implicit. At
the same time, the way in which the story is told is very much actor-centred. Due
 Book Reviews 143

to this, there is a shortage of explicit explanatory accounts despite the rich

historical material.
The book tells us that the sudden fall in labour activism following defeat in the
1969 strike was unexpected. The possible explanation for this unanticipated demise
may be found in the gendered dimension of the labour market and the booming
industry of the time that allowed wage levels to rise to an unprecedented level. But
there is little discussion of to what extent and how the structural conditions of the
time altered unions’ preferred course of action. Perhaps significantly influenced by
the process of industrialisation and the functioning of the capitalist market
economy, labour unions disengaged from their earlier pursuit of egalitarian goals.
And their actions were increasingly motivated by financial incentives and rewards
largely controlled by state mechanisms and chaeb ol. Fuller accounts of this would
have been significant, not least because accounts of labour movements in Korea
typically have failed to explain why labour unionism during the period of
democratisation did not embrace ideas central to earlier labour struggles – namely,
egalitarianism, social solidarity and social rights.
This book nevertheless makes an important contribution to filling the gap
between the immediate postwar years and the period of harsh repression. It also
opens new ground for furthering investigation into the link between the egalitarian
labour struggle during the early years of nation-building and its renewed militancy
during the period of democratisation. It will certainly attract a good deal of
attention from those who are interested in Korea’s labour history and promote
discussion among those exploring the impact of capitalist development and labour
unions’ long struggle against their true identity in Korea’s transition to democracy
and modernity.

GYU-JIN HWANG
The University of Sydney
Ó 2011 Gyu-Jin Hwang

SOYUNG LEE, with essays by JaHyun Kim Haboush, Sunpyo Hong and Chin-
Sung Chang. Art of the Korean Renaissance, 1400–1600. New York: The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009. 140 pp. 16 b/w and 83 colour illustrations.
No price given, hardcover.

This is essentially a catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition of the

same title, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from 17 March to
21 June 2009. It has been marketed as the first English-language publication to
highlight the art of the early period (1400–1600) of Korea’s longest-ruling dynasty,
the Joseon (1392–1910), which ‘‘began at a time equivalent to the early Renaissance
in Europe and ended in the modern era’’ (p. 3). After overthrowing the Goryeo
regime (918–1392) in a relatively bloodless coup, the founders of the new dynasty
began to reform Korea radically into a secular, Neo-Confucian state, while
expunging the ‘‘corrupt’’ influence of Buddhism, the state religion of Goryeo society,
from the public sphere. The taste and patronage of the Joseon royal court and the
Neo-Confucian literati or the new ruling elite directed artistic production towards
144 Book Reviews

secular art. Despite the official suppression of Buddhism, a number of Joseon

monarchs, queens and other members of the royal family, as well as members of the
ruling elite, privately practised Buddhism. Under the patronage of these royals and
other Buddhist devotees, Buddhist art continued to be produced.
Apart from a question as to the usefulness of the term ‘‘renaissance’’ in an art
historical account of the Korean art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the title,
Art of the Korean Renaissance, 1400–1600, prompts an expectation to discover an
extraordinary richness in the Korean art of this period comparable to that of
European Renaissance art. However, the publication concentrates on selected art
forms such as Confucian-inspired, unassuming porcelain pieces collectively called
buncheong, especially its white and undecorated types, which have been among the
most widely publicised representative examples of ‘‘classic Korean art’’ and
‘‘Korean tradition’’. Plain white buncheong was the favourite example of
typical Korean art used by the colonial Japanese connoisseur Yanagi Muneyoshi
(1889–1961) in his Orientalist hypothesis of the national character of Korean art. It
was also prominently featured in postcolonial South Korean reformulations of the
unified and homogenous notion of Korean national identity during the military
regimes (1961 to 1993).
There are some minor editing errors to be discerned. For example, on page 62, it is
unclear to which of the previously quoted references endnote 4 (pp. 194–205) refers.
In endnotes 50 to 53 on page 63, whether the author is citing identical or different
references is ambiguous. Given that no details of ‘‘the Annals of Sejong’’ are to be
found in the bibliography section, could endnotes 50 to 53 refer to Bang
Byeongseong’s 2005 book, Wangjo sillok eul tonghae bon joseon doja (oseon [sic]
Ceramics as Recorded in the Royal Annals)?
Furthermore, some illustrations carry inadequately detailed captions. For
example, the caption for the ‘‘Kyushu screen’’ does not give information on the
authorship of the work. After a second reading of the text and further reflection, this
reviewer is still left with a question as to whether this work, which is presumed to
have been acquired on a Japanese abbot’s trip to Korea in 1538, could have been, in
fact, imported from China, rather than being created by an unidentified Korean
painter.
These are, however, minor points and do not, in the balance, undermine the
important merits of this publication. For example, the three essays by the four
different authors cogently highlight how the effects of the extensive Confucianisa-
tion of Korean society between 1392 and 1600 were manifested in the art
development of this period. The publication presents a captivating account of the
emergence of artists of royal descent during the sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries – ‘‘a phenomenon peculiar to the early Joseon period’’ (p. 30). It also
presents an in-depth study of the interesting development in early Joseon
landscape paintings that was inspired by earlier and contemporaneous Chinese
literary and pictorial representations of the Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang
Rivers.

EN YOUNG AHN
Visiting Fellow, Australian National University
Ó 2011 En Young Ahn
 Book Reviews 145

SOUTHEAST ASIA
ROBERT W. HEFNER (ed) Making Modern Muslims: The Politics of Islamic
Education in Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009. ix, 246 pp.
US$58.00, hardcover; US$26.00, paper.

It is one of the ironies of scholarship that a given area often attracts attention only
when it is the scene of political drama or tragedy, even when these have little to do
with the subject in question. (Think of Vietnamese studies in the West over the past
half-century.) Thus Islamic education in Southeast Asia has been drawn into the
spotlight by violent incidents and allegations of terrorist conspiracy among its
teachers and students, despite the fact that truly militant Islam is representative of
only a tiny minority of schools in the region.
All of the authors are at pains to insist that such political radicalism is not typical,
and devote the bulk of their essays to the more mundane and complex topics of
contemporary Muslim theology and pedagogy and state policies toward Islam.
Nevertheless each leads with the violence, implying that even they are not convinced
that the topic will otherwise engage the reader. To be fair, such radicalism has
promoted responses within the region itself – state attempts to enfold or otherwise
control Islamic education, more detailed studies of what actually goes on in
madrasas and pesantren – that have inspired and facilitated much of the analysis
here. But readers who come to this volume hoping to learn about the terrorist threat
posed by Islamic schools in Southeast Asia will be frustrated to find that there isn’t
really much; the hope, one supposes, is that they will stick around long enough to
learn about the actual subject.
On Muslim theology and pedagogy in the five countries studied – Indonesia,
Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines – there is plenty of detail,
enough to bewilder the non-specialist, despite the best efforts of the editor and
authors to classify and clarify what they can. Even among those of us who know
better than to believe in a univocal Islam, the basic binaries of our understanding –
Sunni versus Shi’a, traditional versus modern – are inadequate to cover the many
different ways in which Southeast Asian Muslims try to maintain their faith within
modern society, much less the range of external influences from Libya through
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States to Pakistan, each trying to export its own
brand of Islam to the region.
Most of the essays seem primarily taxonomic, describing and categorising the
various kinds of Islamic schools in Southeast Asia and what they represent, an effort
undercut by the absence of a general glossary, from which the volume would have
benefited greatly. (The index is a partial substitute, but as it omits such vital terms as
dakwah and tasawwuf the reader remains adrift in a sea of terms.) Deeper analysis
will have to wait until we wrap our heads around the data, although Hefner has
made a promising start in his lengthy ‘Introduction’, which occupies almost a
quarter of the volume. His idea of ‘‘recentering . . . learning and authority’’ may
prove to be a useful approach to intellectual developments in the Islamic world
today.
A few regional trends may be noted. Much of the recent impetus for the
expansion, revival, and reform of Islam has been more puritanical than previous
146 Book Reviews

local incarnations, with a tendency toward greater rejection of not just Western
secularism, but indigenous Islamic traditions as well. It also emphasises religion over
nationalism, suggesting that the claims of global Islam should outweigh those of
Southeast Asian nation-states. And the Islam that is taught in most schools
continues to be simplistic, gender-biased, dependent on rote learning, and insistent
that there is only one true way to understand and practise the faith (though this ‘‘one
true way’’ may vary from school to school).
Despite all this, pragmatism seems paramount both in the schools themselves –
most of which will happily accept resources from any donor – and among the pupils
and their parents, who show a distinct preference for an education that combines
Muslim learning with knowledge of the national language, mathematics, science,
and even English. The main reason that governmental and government-sanctioned
schools have achieved some success, in fact, is that Southeast Asians, even those
strongly committed to Islamic values, also want ‘‘useful’’ knowledge, leading to
exam success, credentials and marketable skills. Whether in the long run there is a
fundamental incompatibility between the authoritarian learning fostered by Islamic
schools and the values of systematic inquiry and open debate that a secular
education is supposed to produce, or whether tension between Islamic globalism and
Southeast Asian nationalisms will eventually spill over into greater political
violence, are questions that remain unanswered.

NORMAN G. OWEN
Duke University
Ó 2011 Norman G. Owen

TERI SHAFFER YAMADA (ed) Modern Short Fiction of Southeast Asia. A

Literary History. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Association for Asian Studies, 2009. 358
pp. US$28.00, paper.

In 2002 Teri Shaffer Yamada edited Virtual Lotus, a collection of modern fiction
from Southeast Asia. It contains 33 short stories from the 10 nation-states that made
up Southeast Asia at the time. The book under review is an excellent companion to
the 2002 publication, with 11 chapters that present critical insights into literary
developments and their historical contexts in Myanmar/Burma, Thailand, Laos,
Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines (Brunei
and Timor Leste are not included). In her introduction, Shaffer Yamada reiterates
the extent to which Southeast Asian modern fiction has been underrepresented and
neglected, because, on the one hand, works in translation are lacking and, on the
other hand, the region is culturally complex and diverse. She emphasises ‘‘the actual
synergy of history and literature, and the importance of viewing them not as
separate but as complementary disciplines’’ (p. 3). The essays present comprehensive
historical overviews of the modern short story as a developing genre; they point to
the important role of literary magazines in publishing short stories and acknowledge
the extent to which awards and prizes encourage authors. One recurring issue is state
control – at times repressive – over presses and the silencing of dissident voices.
Other topics addressed are the prominence of women writers, the question of
 Book Reviews 147

national versus regional literature, the use of English or multiple languages by

Southeast Asian authors, and globalisation.
Kepner and Chotiudompant explore themes of social consciousness, rural and
urban conflict, and alienation in Thai short fiction throughout the twentieth century,
and also examine formal experimentation. In addition, Kepner discusses a 2003 Thai
film and contributes a list of several film titles that is most useful for teaching
purposes. In their chapters on Laos and Cambodia respectively, Koret and Shaffer
Yamada focus on French colonisation, postcolonial Communist regimes, and
traumas of war and violence, analysing their impact on literary production and
content. In her survey of Myanmar/Burma, Allott begins by pointing out that
censorship has been omnipresent ever since the military regime’s Press Scrutiny
Board was established in 1964. Even so, short story writing has always flourished:
literary magazines played a crucial role in publishing stories and in the 1930s the
Khit-san generation moved fiction forward. Talented female authors who address
women’s issues, family life and intergenerational relations in their works have
become very popular.
Malaysian short stories ‘‘exhibit themes that illuminate the major crisis of
modernity’’ and reflect ‘‘the incongruous convergence of Malay, Indian, Chinese
and European cultures’’ (p. 194). Lim and Wong elaborate on language and
identity – Malay, English or a complex layering of the two (and others as well) –
cultural hegemony, Islam and the position of non-Malays in Malaysia’s society.
Multiethnic Singapore, too, has experienced its share of intricate language politics,
with Chinese, Malay and Tamil writers producing literature in English (or rather
‘‘Singlish’’). Their stories reflect ethnographic realism as well as a growing awareness
of a national identity.
Aveling and Zinoman present a clear chronological account of the literary scenes
in Indonesia and Vietnam respectively. Aveling highlights a number of ‘‘landmarks’’
from the pre-Indonesian Tempo Doeloe (Times Past) era to the Japanese occupation,
the postcolonial period and the latest post-1998 writings. Zinoman moves from the
early colonial period through the years of war and revolution to the post-1986
‘‘period of literary dynamism’’ (p. 279).
In the last two essays on the Philippines, Pantoja Hidalgo examines fiction in
English while Torres-Yu surveys stories in Filipino (Tagalog) and regional
Philippine languages. Literature in English is often regarded as superior to Filipino
literature, English being the language of the privileged and elite. Writers who use
Tagalog, Hiligaynon or Bikol tend to be more socially committed to struggle against
colonialism and to espouse nationalist sentiments.
While the essays are ‘‘by no means exhaustive’’ (p. 73) and it is ‘‘impossible to do
justice to all the talented authors writing short stories’’ (p. 178), this volume is a good
reminder that we need more studies in order to fully appreciate literature and literary
developments in Southeast Asia. Modern Short Fiction of Southeast Asia will be key
reading for literature courses about not only Southeast Asia, but the broader region
of Asia as well. The excellent bibliographies will serve students and experts alike.

TINEKE HELLWIG
University of British Columbia
Ó 2011 Tineke Hellwig