The Rape of Nanjing was one of the worst atrocities committed during World War II. On December 13, 1937, the Japanese army captured the city of Nanjing, then the capital of wartime China. According to the International Military Tribunal, during the ensuing massacre 20,000 Chinese men of military age were killed and approximately 20,000 cases of rape occurred; in all, the total number of people killed in and around the city of Nanjing was about 200,000. This carefully researched, intelligent collection of original essays considers the post-World War II treatment in China of the Nanjing Massacre and Japan. The book examines how the issue has developed as a political and diplomatic controversy in the five decades since World War II. In his introduction, Joshua A. Fogel raises the significant moral and historiographical issues that frame the other essays. Mark Eykholt then provides an account of postwar Chinese responses to the massacre. Takashi Yoshida assesses the attempts to downplay the incident and its effects, providing a revealing analysis of Japanese debates over Japan's role in the world and the continuing ambivalence of many Japanese toward their defeat in World War II. In the concluding essay, Daqing Yang widens the scope of the discussion by comparing the Nanjing historiographic debates to similar debates in Germany over the nature of the Holocaust.

As a field of scholarly research, Sino-Japanese studies has grown considerably over the past twenty years, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Joshua Fogel, the editor of this and two previous EastBridge volumes on the subject. Where once this emerging field may have been viewed, usually disparagingly, as a limp appendage of either Chinese or Japanese studies, it has now more or less carved out a space of its own. The essays in this final volume of the trilogy are selected from the best work that previously appeared in the periodical Sino-Japanese Studies on the intellectual and literary relations between China and Japan between the 17th and 20th centuries, all revised to varying degrees by their authors. It is hoped that the increased exposure of republication in book form will help fuel the movement to take seriously the commitment to Chinese and Japanese studies simultaneously.

Although China and Japan have had virtually uninterrupted contact going back over many centuries, the lion's share of works addressing both China and Japan's overseas contacts--cultural and political--have concerned the West. Before the twentieth century, however, Western contacts with Japan were infrequent at best. Throughout the centuries before the twentieth, Chinese culture in the form of books, art objects, religious items, and the like flowed into Japan in great quantity. Within the scholarly community, some attention has focused on Japan and the Japanese elite's reception of the cultural flow and their response to it. By contrast, little if anything has been written about how the Chinese saw the Japanese. By addressing this glaring lacuna, the essays in this volume make a unique contribution.

Czernowitz at 100 represents a collection based on the proceedings of a 2008 international conference convened at York University in Toronto. Each chapter looks back at a portion over a long century, one marked with the mass migration of Ashkenazi Jews across the globe, two world wars, the Holocaust, the birth of Israel, and the rise and fall of the Soviet bloc. They assess the achievements and fate of those who participated in the 1908 Yiddish Language Conference that was held at Czernowitz, now known as Chernivtsi, Ukraine. Featuring contributions from a new generation of scholars re-examining eastern European Jewish life, the successes and failures of the Yiddishist movement are examined. The contributors discuss how Yiddishism-a fascinating example of language-based nationalism-shaped the political and cultural landscape of territorially dispersed Jews across Eastern Europe and the world during the twentieth century.

"China's past and present have been in a continuous dialogue throughout history, one that is heavily influenced by time and language: the temporal orientation and the linguistic apparatus used to express and solidify identity, ideas, and practices. Time and Language: New Sinology and Chinese History argues for and demonstrates the significance of "New Sinology" by bringing language/philology back into the research and understanding of how modern China emerged, and presenting a host of concrete, in-depth, case studies, in which the use of "New Sinology" sheds new light on Chinese history. Reading the modern, therefore, as a careful and ongoing conversation with the past, renders the "new" in a different perspective; taken as a whole, this volume is a significant step towards a new historical narrative of China's modern history, one wherein "ruptures" can exist in tandem with continuities. This collection accentuates the deep connection between language and power--one that spans well across China's long past--and hence the immense consequences of linguistic-related methodology to the comprehension of power structures and identity in China. Each of the essays in this volume tackles these issues--the methodological and the thematic--from a different angle, but they all share the Sinological prism of analysis, and the basic understanding that a much longer timeframe is required to make sense of Chinese modernity. The languages examined are diverse: modern and classical Chinese, of course, but also Manchu and Japanese. Taken together they bring a spectrum of linguistic perspectives and hence a spectrum of power relations and identities to the forefront. While the essays focus on late Qing and early twentieth-century eras, they resort, time and again, to earlier periods, which are necessary to making real sense of later eras. Therefore, the methodological and the thematic do not only converge, but also generate a plea for fostering and expanding this approach in current and future studies. These essays use a variety of angles to examine, with the present moment in mind, questions of Chinese perceptions of and engagement with the past"--

Translations from Shigaku zassh (the oldest historical journal in Japan), 1983-86. Published simultaneously as v.22, no.1-2 of Chinese studies in history. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR