Series III, Vol 3, No. 1, Spring 2006

Sponsored By: Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs - Asian Studies Center, Michigan State University
Editor: Linda Cooke Johnson
©2006 Asian Studies Center, Michigan State University

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Studies On Asia	SERIES III, VOL. 3, NO. 1	Spring 2006
Lee Friederich	In the Voice of a Modern-day Miko: Hiromi Itō’s Retelling of the Sanshō Dayū Legend(pdf)	1
Adam Cathcart	Urban Chinese Perspectives on the U.S. Occupation of Japan, 1945-1947(pdf)	21
Hans Hägerdal	Servião and Belu: Colonial Conceptions and the Geographical Partition of Timor(pdf)	49
Yuxin Ma	Surviving the National Revolution: Chinese Women’s Press Writings(pdf)	65
Talbott Huey	Chinese Books as Cultural Exports from Han to Ming: A Bibliographic Essay(pdf)	85

Lee Friedrich calls attention to the modern author, Hiromi Itō and her retelling of the folk tale of Sanshō Dayū story, in In the Voice of a Modern-day Miko: Hiromi Itō’s Retelling of the Sanshō Dayū Legend. In this tale, a small girl Anju or Anjuhimeko undergoes a series of tortures before dying and becoming enshrined as a Shinto deity. In Itō’s modern recasting of the story, “Watashi wa Anjuhimeko de Aru” [I am Anjuhimeko], told mainly in the girl’s own voice. The poet becomes a miko, a spiritual medium in known in the northern Tohoku region. Friedrich compares Itō’s new version with the ancient myth and with other modern retellings, including that of Mori Ōgai (1915), which inspired the 1954 film by Mizoguchi Kenji, and, most recently, by Umehara Takeshi in 1993. The voice of the miko is prominent throughout the paper.
*This paper was a 2005 MCAA Buchanan graduate prize winner.

In Urban Chinese Perspectives on the U.S. Occupation of Japan, 1945-1947, Adam Cathcart traces Chinese resistance against the Japanese who, in 1945, had recently brutally occupied China, and were under the Allied Occupation from 1945-1947. Cathcart uses documents from the Chinese press to chart the reactions of primarily urban, press-reading Chinese in Shanghai and Beijing to the American revival of Japan.
*This paper was a 2005 MCAA Buchanan graduate prize winner.

Swedish scholar Hans Hägerdal explores the historical background to the present day division of the island of Timor between Indonesia and Timor Leste in Servião and Belu:Colonial Conceptions and the Geographical Partition of Timor. He compares Dutch and Portuguese occupation of the island in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, finding that the colonial occupiers did not clearly understand the indigenous factions and languages already in place. His findings underlie the present conflicts in Timor.

In Surviving the National Revolution: Chinese Women’s Press Writings, Yuxin Ma examines women’s writings as published in the Chinese Press during the Republican period. She selects three examples: the protest of women students against an autocratic college president, also a woman, in Beijing in 1924-25, which resulted in the removal of Yang Yinyu and the revision of women’s education; the writings of women who joined the Republican Army in 1926-27 and found life in the army did not match up with their romantic expectations of serving the nation; and a women’s publication, Shanghai Women (Shanghai funü), a journal of Women’s Society of Shanghai Special Municipality was edited by Liu Hengjing. Shanghai Women provided legal advice to women and helped solve their problems.
*This paper was a 2005 MCAA Buchanan graduate prize winner.

Talbott Huey addresses the question of how neighboring states like Korea, Japan, and Vietnam gained access to the Chinese classical books and sources that in turn had great influence in their own cultures in Chinese Books as Cultural Exports from Han to Ming: A Bibliographic Essay. Huey examines English-languages publications that contain information on the kinds of books exported by China and the ways in which printing spread to these other states prior to and during the Ming dynasty.