In the context of the japanese colonial empire, debates about colonial identity have tended to focus on the relationship between Japanese rulers and non-Japanese colonial subjects. The main problems for analysis have been the development of assimilationist and/or discriminatory policies toward colonized peoples, and the way in which the colonized—Koreans, Taiwanese, Micronesians, and others—resisted or adapted to the pressures of those policies. It is perhaps for this reason that rather little scholarly work has been published, in Japanese or in English, about the history of the Japanese colony of Karafuto, which was, after all, overwhelmingly a settler colony. By the mid-1930s, the colony had just over three hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom the vast majority were recent migrants from Japan, though official statistics also record the presence of some two hundred Russians, around two thousand indigenous people—mostly Ainu, Uilta and Nivkh—and almost six thousand Koreans, a group whose numbers were to grow very rapidly from the late 1930s to the mid-1940s. Very recently, however, increasing attention has begun to be directed to the complex, contested, and paradoxical process of identity formation amongst various groups of Japanese colonizers, especially amongst those Japanese who were born or brought up in the colonies (Kawamura 1994; 2000; Tomiyama 1997; Young 1998; Tamanoi 2000). In this context, Karafuto—as a predominantly settler colony—has a particularly interesting story to tell.

The only aspect of this bizarre famine that historians really know for sure is that the Hachinohe chroniclers of the day remembered it as the “wild boar famine” (inoshishi kegachi) of 1749. From what can be pieced together from the few available sources, thousands of peasants from Hachinohe died when an intensification of slash-and-burn farming, fueled by economic growth during the Tokugawa period (1600–1868), combined with terrestrial and climatological environmental changes and converged on this small northeastern domain. This convergence disrupted local agricultural cycles, caused food shortages, and, ultimately, pitted the human population against wild boar in a life-or-death struggle for survival. Like other domains, Hachinohe had faced worsening economic conditions throughout the eighteenth century, and so it took advantage of the commercialization of the economy by sponsoring cash-crop farming in the form of soybean cultivation to meet the growing financial demands of doling out retainer stipends and paying the other high costs of life in the Tokugawa polity. As peasants cleared new swaths of land for soybean cultivation, however, they in turn sparked changes in the land that led to an explosion of the wild boar population. Wild boar thrived in the newly deforested terrain—a terrain that, with its ample brush and many tuberous plants, supplied them with shelter and food.

I Approach my topic—the development of the modern Japanese political cartoon—with some trepidation. Humor is a fragile product that can easily be damaged by academic scrutiny. As Evelyn Waugh once remarked, analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog—much is learned but in the end the frog is dead. Waugh was right. Most analyses of humor cannot be read for amusement. On the other hand, why should they be? If Shakespeare scholars are not expected to write in iambic pentameter, why should students of humor be expected to keep their readers in stitches? As the editor of the International Journal of Humor Studies recently told a reporter, “We are not in the business of being funny” (New York Times, 19 December 2000).

In the early part of this century, 1916 and 1921 were especially dry years in the Kumaon region of the Indian Himalaya. In each of these years, forest fires racked the countryside, burning beyond the power of the colonial British government to control or extinguish. It was not just the dry weather that was to blame. Villagers in Kumaon set the forest on fire; the dry weather merely helped their efforts along. The containment of this “planned incendiarism” was one of the main planks of the scientific forestry that the colonial state had begun to introduce in the hills in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and especially from around 1910.

Historically, tokugawa Samurai were a legal creation that grew out of the landed warriors of the medieval age; they came to be defined by the Tokugawa shogunate in terms of hereditary status, a right to hold public office, a right to bear arms, and a “cultural superiority” upheld through educational preferment (Smith 1988, 134). With the prominent exception of Eiko Ikegami's recent The Taming of the Samurai (1995), little has been written in English in the past two decades regarding the sociopolitical history of the samurai in Tokugawa and Meiji Japan. E. H. Norman's seminal work, Japan's Emergence as a Modern State, established the parameters of debate among American historians of Japan from the 1950s through the 1970s. Drawing on the Marxist historiography of prewar Japan, Norman interpreted the Meiji Restoration in terms of class conflict: a modified bourgeois revolution directed against a feudal Tokugawa regime, led by a coalition of lower samurai and merchants, and supported by a peasant militia (Norman [1940] 1975).

Since its appearance in 1983, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism has taken on almost talismanic status, ritually invoked for its quasi-magical efficacy in thousands of scholarly discussions of nationalism and ethnicity. Anderson's book has given focus to a line of argument in which not only nationalism but also ethnicity are seen as reflexes of the Euroamerican colonial enterprise. Anderson proposes what we might call an “appendency theory” of ethnicity, holding that ethnicity is a phenomenon that is secondary to, contingent upon, and necessarily later than the modern nation, and that therefore it could not possibly have existed prior to the colonial conquest and the creation of nation-states. In this view, ethnicity itself is a recent product of modern history—of the colonial or postcolonial era, the age of the modern nation state and the capitalist world system.

The japanese assault on the city of nanking in December 1937 was one of many incidents that the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE, 1946–48) examined in the course of judging the wartime leaders of Japan. What was referred to at the time as the “Rape of Nanking” has in the last several decades become a controversial marker of Chinese identity as well as a source of potent disagreement among Japanese over their nation's history as a colonial power in East Asia. Within this controversy, the IMTFE trial in Tokyo has been used as a touchstone to confirm and deny all manner of claims concerning the incident. Those who feel aggrieved over Japan's conduct toward China cite the evidence produced at the trial to authenticate the scale and brutality of the massacre (Eykholt 2000, 19–23). Those who feel that Japan and the emperor system have been unfairly blamed for the war in East Asia scour the trial proceedings for failures of logic and evidence that demonstrate to their satisfaction that the “Tokyo trial view of history” is nothing but anti-Japanese distortion and fabrication (Yoshida 2000, 111–14). For both sides, the Tokyo judgment is fuel for ideological fire.

In place of the distinct peoples and cultures that once formed the object of ethnographic inquiry, anthropologists have for some time been emphasizing the political and economic processes that connect people and places, and the ongoing production of cultural difference in contexts of unequal power. This trend in scholarly analysis contrasts with assumptions about primordial difference that inspire indigenous rights activists to defend the autonomy of culturally distinct communities from state and market processes intruding on them from the outside. It contrasts also with the emphasis on difference and isolation in official discourses that cast “development” as a program to bring change to people without history, stalled at an earlier point in an evolutionary process.

Located on the high altitude slopes in China's mountainous southwestern hinterlands, the Nuosu (Yi) have long been characterized by ethnologists in China as a slave society. In this essay I explore the appropriateness of the label with reference to the distinction, associated with the classicist Moses Finley in his studies of Greco-Roman society, between slave societies and societies with slaves (Finley 1983, 79–83). But my main purpose in focusing on Nuosu slavery, as we know it from the first half of the twentieth century, is to gain a better understanding of Nuosu identity. It makes sense to me that the process by which outsiders, that is, slaves brought in as captives, became insiders reveals a great deal about the constructs of the Nuosu ideology of common origins and identity and about how this transformation from alien to native worked in practice among people historically “remarkably resistant to acculturation,”with boundaries that remain to this day sharp, clear, and relatively impenetrable (Harrell 1995, 101, 104).

Marriage has been widely accepted as a universal institution that allows a kinship system to establish and perpetuate itself (Levi-Strauss 1963). Although the well-known case of the Nayar in Central Kerala of India has seriously problematized the anthropological definitions of marriage (Gough 1959), the universality of the institution is still accepted up to this day (Ember and Ember 1999). Since the early 1980s, however, a growing body of literature on the Moso, a matrilineal group in Southwest China, has made available an ethnographic case in which marriage is not the primary sexual-reproductive institution (Zhan et al. 1980; Yan and Song 1983; YNSBJZ 1986, 1987, 1988; Shih 1993; Weng 1993; Guo 1997; Cai 1997). Among the Moso, the majority of adults have practiced a visiting system called tisese (pronounced as “tea-say-say”), which differs from marriage in that it is noncontractual, nonobligatory, and nonexclusive (Shih 1993). Meanwhile, mostly amongst the elites, marriage has coexisted with tisese in Moso society for centuries.

Like other parts of the muslim world, Indonesia has experienced an Islamic revival since the 1970s (cf. Hefner 1997; Jones 1980; Liddle 1996, 622–25; Muzaffar 1986; Schwarz 1994, 173–76; Tessler and Jesse 1996). To date, representations of Indonesia's Islamic revival have featured forms of religious practice and political activity concerned with what in the Sufi tradition is called the “outer” (lahir) expression of Islam: support for and observance of religious law (I. syariah, A. syari'at), including the practice of obligatory rituals. Thus commonly mentioned as evidence of a revival in Indonesia are such things as the growing numbers of mosques and prayer houses, the increasing popularity of head coverings (kerudung, jilbab) among Muslim women and school girls, the increasing usage of Islamic greetings, the more common sight of Muslims excusing themselves for daily prayers and attending services at their workplaces, the appearance of new forms of Islamic student activity on university campuses, strong popular agitation against government actions seen as prejudicial to the Muslim community, and the establishment in 1991 of an Islamic bank.

These words were expressed by Gangzhen and Cizhu, two peasant women born in the early twentieth century who lived in two villages in Jiangyong County of Hunan Province in southern China. When confronted with the loss of their husbands, these women relied on local tools familiar to women in this area—nüge and nüshu—to articulate their thoughts and emotions. Nüge (literally, “female song”), which includes bridal laments and folk narratives, was widely practiced among peasant women in southern China, especially prior to the Liberation of 1949. Nüshu (“female writing”), in contrast, was used extensively by peasant women in Jiangyong. Moreover, it is one of the very few writing systems in the world that is mostly illegible to men. This male-illegible script,3 which is semiphonetic compared to the ideographs of Chinese hanzi,4 was used for centuries among hanzi-illitetate women, but it remained basically undocumented and unknown to the outside world until the 1980s, just as it was becoming extinct. Prior to Liberation, Jiangyong women had used nüshu to write sisterhood letters, biographic laments, wedding literature, folk stories, and other narratives in verse form. Combined with nüge, they documented peasant women's experiences and gave voices to their existence.

Shi Shangxian was the youngest son of an impoverished Han (ethnic Chinese) family living in eighteenth-century Yunnan Province. As a boy, he was sold to another Han family for the purpose of marrying one of the family's daughters. Although there is no record of his married life, it apparently was not a happy one. Shi left his wife in 1748, never to return, and drifted southwestward toward the Burmese frontier to engage in commerce between the booming Munai mining region and the Tai polity of Keng Tung (now part of Burma). Shi eventually remarried, this time to an indigenous woman who belonged to one of the local Tai or upland tribes. Thus far, Shi's story is unexceptional. By the mid-eighteenth century, as many as one hundred thousand Han lived in mining communities along the Yunnan frontier (ZPZZ, 1733–2, Zhang Yunsui QL 11/5/9). Han men often married indigenous women, to the consternation of Qing officials who feared the political ramifications of intermarriage (ZPZZ, 142–1, Fuheng et al. QL 35/1/19). Shi, however, emerged from obscurity in 1765 when he and his father-in-law, a petty local leader, sided with Burma during the frontier wars of 1765–70 and attacked Qing territory. Shi, the Han ally of the Burmese, was later captured by Cao Xiu, the son of an indigenous “native official” (tusi) whose militia was patrolling the frontier at the behest of the Qing state.

“The horse of these islands has arrived at such a state of degeneration,” concludes a report to the Governor-general of the Philippines in 1883, “that it is useless to think of its rejuvenation, it being much easier and more convenient to create a new breed with the importation of mares and Stallions from Spain” (Raza de Caballeria de Filipinas 1883). The debate over the colonial government's attempt to improve equine bloodlines through a selected breeding program with Arab stallions in the 1880s reveals much about changing Spanish attitudes toward nature in tropical regions. Although colonialism had endured in the Philippines since 1565, it was only in the nineteenth century that Europeans began to see themselves as maladapted to settlement in the islands. The tropics were increasingly regarded as a hostile and deleterious environment, and prolonged exposure to a hot and moist climate was blamed for the poor health of individuals and a progressive degeneration of race. Yet far from having to await the advances in bacteriology and parasitology of a new century (Anderson 1995), Spaniards displayed a growing conviction as to the efficacy of their own ability to control the natural world through an understanding of the processes of acclimatization.

The economic relationship between East Asia and the European Union (EU) has been the subject of increasing academic attention. This has been heightened by politico-institutional endeavors to strengthen the weak link in the “Triad” (Europe, East Asia, North America—the world's dominant economic regions) since the early 1990s, including various bilateral initiatives such as the 1991 Japan–EU Declaration and the 1996 Korea–EU Trade and Co-operation Agreement, as well as the new interregional “dialogue framework” provided by the Asia–Europe Meetings (ASEM). The ASEM has wider geoeconomic significance in that it constitutes the last interregional Triadic arrangement to fall into place, the others being the Asia–Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) forum (augmenting the transpacific axis) and the New Transatlantic Agenda (transatlantic axis).