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Return to Contents, Volume XXVII, Southeast Review of Asian Studies

BOOK REVIEWS

Gerald Horne. Race War! White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire. New York and London: New York University Press, 2004. ISBN: 0-8147-3640-8.

Reviewed by Daniel A. Metraux

Japan’s early victories in the Pacific theatre of World War II were stunning. White European colonies in the Philippines, Malaya, Indonesia, Singapore and Indochina quickly collapsed before the onslaught of the Japanese military. National leaders in Washington, London, Paris and in the Netherlands were further surprised by the strong support that Japanese forces received from local elites in many of the Western colonies that they had successfully invaded.

Author Gerald Horne, Professor of African and Afro-American Studies at the University of North Carolina, goes to great lengths in Race War! to reveal how both European and American racism had been very skillfully exploited by the Japanese for several decades to create both support and sympathy for the Japanese not only among Asians long dominated by the West, but also among Afro-American communities in the United States. Through many interviews and careful archival research, Horne demon-strates how race played a critical role throughout the war.

Japan’s war cry, “Asia for the Asians” had a ready audience throughout colonial Asia. The Japanese had little difficulty in their exposure and exploitation of the system of white supremacy, which, as Horne notes, was “the glue that held the colonial empires together.” During the early stages of the conflict the Japanese military further exploited white racism by portraying the conflict as a reaction to the former white domination of the Pacific. The Japanese constructed a clever reverse racial hierarchy in their internment camps where white captives were placed at the bottom of the social hierarchy under the supervision of Chinese, Korean and Indian guards. The author quotes historian David Steinberg who noted that in regard to the Philippines, “Many of the atrocities of the Death March and the humiliations of the prison camps were perpetuated to demean Americans before Filipinos.” (p. 298)

Horne traces Tokyo’s resistance against white supremacy as far back as the Versailles Conference where the Japanese delegation called for the League of Nations to recognize racial equality only to have the proposal shot down by the U.S., Britain and France. The Japanese refused to let the issue die, even sponsoring a “Pan-Asian” conference in Nagasaki in 1926 which denounced the racism of the West.

Japan’s attacks on the West’s racism found a ready audience because white supremacy was practiced everywhere the West dominated Asia. A sign in extraterritorial Shanghai barred “dogs and yellow people” from many parks and public buildings. India was “a slave under the British people” and it was understood that “no white person ever thanks an Indian for anything.” Australia had a white-only policy towards immigration that excluded even nonwhite refugees from other parts of the British Empire.

Horne goes to great lengths to document the racist attitudes of American, British and other European leaders of the time. For example, he offers the following statement by Harry S. Truman, who as President desegregated the military: “I think one man is as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman. Uncle Will… says that the Lord made a white man out of dust, a nigger from mud, then threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is a race prejudice I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion that Negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia, and white men in Europe and America.” (p. 225)

What is ironic is that despite this racial exploitation, the survival of Western empires depended upon the support of the very people they sought to exploit. For example, the British army had tens of thousands of Indian and African recruits who fought hard against the Japanese throughout the Pacific theatre. The Western empires had no hope of survival without the extensive cooperation of native peoples, a fact that Gandhi exploited very effectively in his non-cooperation movement in India.

Japan’s message even reached the Afro-American community in the United States, many of whose leaders developed pro-Japanese feelings because of Tokyo’s alleged determination to fight against the racist Empires of the West. Many American Blacks, according to Horne, admired the Japanese because “they were the first colored nation to refuse to take orders or to be bluffed by white Europeans or Americans in generations. W.E.B Du Bois is quoted by Horne as accusing the British Empire of having “caused more human misery than Hitler will cause if he lives a hundred years.”

Horne also shows how many Indians also strongly supported Japan as the natural leader of Asia because it was supposedly the only modern power able to effectively challenge the color bar inflicted on Asia

Horne does see some good coming from the War. The termination of the West’s empires also ended the blatant racism of the West in Asia and elsewhere and forced the West to come to terms with its racial attitudes. There grew a greater tolerance that has gradually led to an end to legal segregation in the United States and elsewhere.

Horne’s analysis of the race problem and its role in World War II is both brilliant and convincing. In a sense, his arguments mirror neo-conservatives in Japan today who argue that the Japanese were the “good guys” in the war because their actions led to the quick collapse of Western empires in Asia shortly after the war. True, but why then did the West win the war? Horne fails to provide a rational answer to this very real historical fact. Horne also almost totally ignores the barbarity of the Japanese who, according to some sources, may have murdered forty to fifty million Asians in their drive for Asian conquest. There is no real mention of the awful Japanese practice of exploiting Asian “comfort women.” These are glaring omissions which take away from the value of this otherwise well-researched and developed work of scholarship.

Horne also buries his reader in an ocean of quotes and facts to support his arguments. This is fine, but he overdoes it, making his book fairly tedious to read at times. It would have been a much better read with fewer facts and more scholarly analysis.

The Unwanted: A Memoir. By Kien Nguyen. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2001. Pp 343. ISBN: 0316284610

Reviewed by Christina Firpo

The Unwanted: A Memoir tells the true story of Kien Nguyen, the child of a Vietnamese mother and an American soldier who departed for the US when Kien was just three months old.  Kien’s narrative unfolds during the last hours of the Republic of Vietnam and the first years of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and Socialist Republic of Vietnam. As a result of the period’s political upheavals, Kien suffered a shattering reversal of status and ensuing discrimination.  The Unwanted is an important contribution to the historical sources of post-unification Vietnam and the histories of the Amer-asian experience in post-war Vietnam.

When his memoir begins in 1972, Kien is a five-year-old from an elite, nouveau-riche Nha Trang family. However, after the communist takeover in 1975, he and his brother, being Amer-asian, are maligned as products of the capitalist enemy.  Their pregnant mother moves her family to Saigon and attempts to escape the country by helicopter.  But the helicopter explodes as it descends on the embassy roof -- and along with it the only chance for Kien’s family to leave the country.

Kien’s family hides in the basement of a rented house as northern soldiers conduct house searches.  His mother dyes his and his brother’s hair black and attempts to abort her fetus. Neither the dye job nor the abortion is successful, and the family is discovered by soldiers and ordered back to Nha Trang.  Meanwhile, their former house servants have ascended to town leadership positions and are seeking vengeance.

To survive, Kien is directed to hide his racial identity and be ashamed. Kien writes:  “I wanted to pull the fair hair out of my head, scratch off my pale skin, and peel the expensive sandals from my feet so that shame would no longer haunt my mother’s eyes.  His mother is officially labeled as a former prostitute; as such, she cannot find work, and the family often goes hungry for days at a time. Worse yet, Kien is raped by his mother’s ex-boyfriend and severely beaten by his own cousin.  After a botched attempt to escape to the US by boat, he is sent to prison for a few months.  In 1984 Kien and his nuclear family qualify for the Orderly Departure Program (ODP), which allowed children of US troops to emigrate to the USA.  Kien finally leaves Vietnam in May 1985.

The Unwanted consists of three distinct yet interwoven elements.  First, it is a window into the political ramifications of post-war reconstruction, a crucial moment in modern Vietnamese history.  Second, it examines the effect of communist-led reunification on families and children.  Finally, it offers an all-too-rare look at the plight of Amer-asians during the period.

As a political history, the book dramatizes the inversion in socio-economic class structure that occurred after the communist takeover in 1975.  Those who were once part of the upper class were now lower class and the former lower class ascended in social and political status.  Many of the southern families had to take drastic measures to survive. As Kien describes, many women aborted their pregnancies for fear that they would not be able to feed an extra mouth.  Individuals attempted to escape by boat despite major risks: pirates, prison, or even death.

The book also highlights the radical transition that occurred in the realm of the family.  Before unification, the southern family was a private, extended-kin based unit whose loyalty was primarily to the family’s ancestors.  After unification, the family was legislated to become a state-oriented worker unit.  As a result, children like Kien were forced to grow up exceedingly fast: children were given adult responsibilities.

Kien’s Amer-asian background, and the suffering that he endures as a result, is yet another of the book’s themes.  Amer-asian children were not permitted to attend university and were often shunned or even punished.  Kien ultimately leaves Vietnam because the institutional and social discrimination against him would have impeded his chance for a successful future. Although the US and Vietnam had virtually no diplomatic relations, the Vietnamese government was willing to solve the Amer-asian and Eurasian “problem” by permitting emigration via the ODP agreement. 

It is important to note that Kien is not completely ostracized, as are the Afro-Amerasian children who appear in the book.  He is accepted by some high ranking members of society: the soldiers who transport him from Saigon to Nha Trang take him under their tutelage; his school teacher favors him; and, in his teen years, his girlfriend is the daughter of a high-ranking northern communist party member.  That said, Amerasians’ experiences on the margins of society should not be ignored.

Although The Unwanted is told from a child’s point of view, it nevertheless manages to make references to many important historical details.  As Kien explains in the “Author’s Note,” he wrote this book with the help of his brother’s and mother’s memories.  As a result, the reader can experience Kien’s childhood emotions as well as historically relevant events such as the town meetings and adult conversations.

The Unwanted is a rarity:  a moving memoir as well as a first-rate  history of the period. As a historian of Vietnam, I strongly recommend The Unwanted for under-graduate or graduate classes on the American-Vietnamese War and modern Vietnamese history.

Karl Meyer, The Dust of Empire: The Race for Mastery in the Asian Heartland. Philadelphia: Perseus Publishing, 2004. 288p. ISBN: 1586482416

Reviewed by Elizabeth L. Metraux

It is not unreasonable as the beginning of twenty-first century unfolds, to reassess the role that the United States has, and will continue to play, in a drastically changing world where America finds itself as the primary international actor. Yet as we continue to assert our American supremacy around the globe vis-à-vis culture and socio-political influence, it would be wise to heed the warnings implicit in Karl Meyer's fascinating analysis of the Dust of Empire: The Race for Mastery in the Asian Heartland. While maintaining its objectivity in reviewing a range of country case studies, Meyer’s book is also peppered with substantiated arguments citing U.S. imperialism as a potentially detrimental, self-perpetuating force that, though often advantageous, may nevertheless appear in the history books to be yet another imperialistic failure.

The essential thesis of the book alleges an ubiquity of American ignorance, that is, the lack of information about the Asian heartland that has rendered the United States an intellectually ill-equipped superpower, unaware (perhaps a byproduct of arrogance) of the failures and idiosyncratic nuances in which Central Asia is saturated. We have turned a blind eye to factual, historical evidence, refusing to accept the reality that the grounds sought may very well be unfertile and inauspicious for sustaining liberal, "Western" democracy (if one naively believes that that is, in fact, our "noble" objective, as opposed to instilling a U.S.-backed puppet regime). Time and again, we have paid little focus to the predominant factors that appear obvious in retrospect, when reviewing the history of the region, but fall on the deaf ears of those in power.

American leadership, acting on the cold assumption of Indian Viceroy Lord Curzon, operates as though countries are simply "pieces on a chessboard which is being played out in a great game for the domination of the world." It is a chilling truth. Nonetheless, however, we also must recognize that, as Meyer reminds us, countries are not made, but born. The destruction, then, inevitable to a nation created by the invisible, powerful hands of world (U.S.) leadership, could be nothing less than absolutely devastating. One need only look at the "tactful" installation of the Shah of Iran and the subsequent backlash, and then turn our eyes to Afghanistan or to Iraq, and the writing on the wall is clear.

Moreover, few Americans recall the severe defeat of the Russians and the British in Tibet, Iran, and Afghanistan. Again, if historical precedent is taken into account, especially as per Afghanistan, while the banners flew high during the United States military campaign, history books stating the proud Afghan legacy of their undefeated record against military power, seemed to collect more dust.

Meyer illuminates this obscure, and invaluable history of the Central Asian heartland, noting that America possesses a "crippling disadvantage in its encounter with the inner Asian world… worse than a lack of knowledge… it is a lack of curiosity." What is so profoundly disturbing in that truth, is that armed with nothing but our weapons, we have neglected considerable cultural dynamics, continuing to maintain military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other nations in the region, while still boorishly echoing Churchill's sentiments after the Sudanese battle at Omduran: "What enterprise that an enlightened community may attempt is more noble and profitable than the reclamation from barbarism of a fertile region and large populations? To give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to plant the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole people their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain – what more beautiful ideal or more valuable reward can inspire human effort? The act is virtuous, the exercise invigorating, and the result often extremely profitable."

In Mark Twain's observation of the Boer War, it is striking how accurate his reflection is when translated to America’s present military exploits in Central Asia. He states that "Mr. Chamberlain manufactures a war out of material so inadequate and so fanciful that they make the boxes grieve and the galleries laugh, and he tries hard to persuade himself that it isn't purely a private raid for cash, but has a sort of dim, vague respectability about it somewhere, if he could only find the spot; and that, by and by, he can scour the flag clean again after he has finished dragging it through the mud." Meyer's keen ability to bring historical analyses into the modern world, remind the reader that though actors have changed, the certainty of failure in coercing and attempting to dominate an obstinate world, are unchanging.

So what is to become of the prevailing hegemonic system we now find ourselves living in? Should the trusted adage hold true that we are doomed to repeat the past, the dust of our own Empire will likely settle in the Asian heartland, trampled by the inhabitants that continue to vex and astound the global powers that have tried and failed to control the region. As John F. Kennedy aptly observed, "We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient." In 2005, those words are truer, and more disregarded, than ever.

Karl E. Meyer's new book is not only readable and well informed but timely to an almost painful degree. I recommend its review by anyone with an interest in central Asia.

Sharankumar Limbale, The Outcaste Akkarmashi. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003. ISBN: 0-19566-548-1 $15.95

Reviewed by Tromila Wheat

What is it like to grow up as an impoverished outcaste in modern India? Perhaps the best way to find out is through the words and emotions of those who have lived through the experience and who have the education and talent to write so expressively about it. One obvious source is Sharakumar Limbale’s recent autobiography, The Outcaste Akkarmashi.

Limbale is a well-known Dalit activist writer, editor and critic who has worked successfully with several literary genres and is the author of some 24 books and who serves as the Regional Director of the Yashwantrao Chavan Mararashtra Open University, Naashik in India.

The Life of an Outcaste

The caste of a Hindu Indian, Limbale frequently tells us, determines everything about his life, including the clothes he will wear, the person he will marry, and the food he will eat. Limbale describes the life a man who suffered not only through this caste system but also through the pain of not even being allowed into the caste system: he was an outcaste, below everyone else. The one thing that controlled his life from the time he was a child was hunger; he knew that a man was no bigger than his own hunger and that there was no escape from it. Not only did he physically suffer from his deep, insatiable hunger, his entire life he lived under the curse of not having “pure blood.” Because his mother had him out of wedlock with the chief of the village, he belonged nowhere and no one would accept him. In the end, he found his salvation in Buddhism. His entire life he had watched religion tear people and families apart, and he wanted no part of it. The Outcaste clearly shows how the lives of India’s lowest citizens are completely controlled by the society around them.

The dominating theme throughout the book is the Dalit’s constant battle with hunger. Although Limbale is allowed the privilege of going to school, he had to watch the higher caste children eat lavish meals and could only hope that they would be generous with their scraps. When he devoured those precious morsels, his mother would yell at him when he got home for being so selfish and not saving any for her or his sisters. His grandmother would eat bhakari made from the corn she had dug out a pile of manure so that her grandchildren would have what little good flour she had left. She made incredible sacrifices, but her house still went hungry until they were able to beg on a market day or until a good friend received the contract to remove a dead animal. As a child Limbale firmly believed that hunger controlled men, and if there had been no hunger, there would have been no strife and no war.

Another nearly impossible hurdle that the author suffered his entire life was the fact that he had no identity, no home or place of belonging. His mother had once been properly married, but her husband had left her and taken their two sons. She began sleeping around, especially with the high caste men of the village. Limbale was born with a Dalit mother and a father who was the chief of a village. He could not get certain papers signed for school because he could not properly identify his caste by his mother or father, and they would not accept his grandmother as his guardian because she lived with a Muslim. When it came time for marriage, he could not even get married to an outcaste girl because his blood was not pure; he was not wanted anywhere. Eventually, a drunkard who had offered Limbale his daughter would not allow her to leave after the wedding because of Limbale’s background. The clouds of doubt and identity hung over this poor outcaste boy his entire life.

However, in several acts of incredible strength and bravery, he did not allow these socially constructed walls to stop him from getting an education and eventually publishing his story. He came to realize the depth of division caused by the conflict between Hindus and Muslims and chose a separate path for himself in what he considered to be the warm embrace of Buddhism. He was not the only Mahar to overcome the repressive system; his friend Mallya also prevailed, and both men live happily today despite the horrors they faced as children and young adults.

Limbale’s autobiography is a good quick read that would interest any students taking a course on modern India. It is an objective work that shows little bitterness or remorse. The author includes an excellent introduction that introduces the caste system to the Western reader. We can experience the humiliation of the Dalit community at the hands of an unthinking privileged class and the hopelessness of the situation of people born in lower castes.

Anchee Min, Empress Orchid: A Novel. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. ISBN: 0618068872. $24

Reviewed by Daniel A. Metraux

Anybody who has seen The Last Emperor would surely want to call this novel The Last Empress. Here through the marvelous creative writing of Anchee Min, whose autobiographical novel Red Azalea brilliantly depicts life in China during the Cultural Revolution, we can trace the life of a young woman from an honorable but very poor Manchu family in the mid-1800s who became the de facto ruler of China during the last four decades of the 19^th century.

The whole story is narrated by the Empress, called Orchid because of her beauty.

We first meet her as a young daughter of a poor but honorable aristocratic clan related to the Manchus. She accompanies her family to Beijing to bury her recently deceased father and they are forced to live under wretched conditions upon their arrival. Soon, however, they discover an Imperial decree announcing that the young Emperor Hsien Feng is looking for future wives. All candidates must be of pure Manchu blood. Orchid applies and is one of the few chosen to move into the imperial palace. At first the Emperor ignores her, but she uses chicanery to lure him to her and when he discovers her beauty, intelligence and common sense approach to life, the couple become one and she becomes one of his trusted advisors.

Orchid, who soon takes the name Lady Yehonala, is a brilliant manipulator of Court politics. Her power is enhanced through her control of the Emperor and his seal as well as her careful alliances with other powerful figures at Court. But her greatest stroke of luck is bearing the Emperor his first son when another wife had given him a baby girl.

When the Emperor dies at age thirty in 1861, she instigates a palace coup that bring her, her five-year-old son, and her supporters to power, destroying other would-be power cliques.

The novel ends here, but any student of Chinese history knows the rest of the story. From the 1860s through to her death in 1908, she was the effective ruler of China.

Her legacy was one of extreme conservatism which moved China in a very different direction than the modernizing and then very progressive Japanese.

Anchee Minh describes the life at Court in meticulous detail. She seems to take a few historic liberties in composing her novel, but she does manage to convey the very restrictive and isolated nature of imperial life in Beijing more than a century ago. There is good coverage of the Western penetration of China and of the unwillingness and inability of the Court to respond to this challenge. The novel is very well written and might be a good selection for a course on modern China.

Edward LeRoy Long, Jr. Facing Terrorism: Responding as Christians (Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004)

Reviewed by Gordon Bowen

The book reads like an extended lament by a liberal Christian thinker who is bemoaning at length the fact that religious opposition to Bush Administration policies has been “largely ignored.”  In a mere 112 pages, Long's essay provides an extensive argument illustrating why this remains the case.  The book ultimately finds a spirit generous enough to blame the United States, not Al Qaeda’s continuing campaign of terrorism, for the deterioration of the human condition since September 2001.

In the book, Long makes an argument that starts with a fast run past definitional issues so to move on by constructing a falsified history of the U.S. in Southwest Asia, one in which aid to the Taliban is attributed to our government (21).  In fact, U.S. aid to anti-Soviet rebels in Afghanistan ended several years prior to the rise of the Taliban, but that fact is inconvenient to Long's argument, so he simply ropes that misstatement to another which also is of questionable veracity: “at one point the United States actually supported both Saddam Hussein and the Taliban because it saw them as effective allies in the effort to restrain Soviet power” (21).  But it was Iranian, not Soviet, power that occasioned the tilt toward Saddam in the 1980s, and it involved no direct military aid to Saddam by the United States in any event.  

The twisting of facts to suit his argument continues elsewhere in the book.  Israel is presented as itself being the cause of the relentless attacks it has endured from terrorists (24), as if the Palestinians somehow were barred from emulating Gandhi in their choice of role models: “terrorism may be less a means of obtaining a different ordering of the political situation than a way of expressing bitter discontent with the present state of affairs.”  Thus, to Long, suicide bombs become a form of free speech.

In truth, Long is not trying to write history; he most is concerned to marginalize and condemn what he calls the “crusader model” which he associates with contemporary U.S. policy.  “Moreover, a major shift in thinking was made by the administration for guiding defense policy.  The idea of deterrence was repudiated and replaced with the idea of the preemptive strike.  The idea of cooperative membership in the community of nations was compromised by the embrace of the idea of full spectrum dominance – the idea that America’s military power must be overpowering in every part of the world.  Although this shift has not been without its critics, it clearly illustrates how deeply the model of the crusade has taken over as the controlling paradigm since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon” (89-90).

This formulation also does not derive from close study of policy itself.  If policy was at the core of this analysis, it would have to deal with the fact that the Clinton Administration also pursued a strategy that pointed to American global primacy.  Long's critique of the Bush approach most is based on Long's philosophic preferences, in this case his supposition that war can solve nothing: “The United States, a powerful nation feeling the warrant for exercising its power unilaterally if necessary, might even come to act in ways that actually conform to the image its detractors have of it.  Moreover, the United States will bear the onus for the violence of retaliatory actions taken… One does not have to be a pacifist to realize that the circle of violence is not brought to an end by the achievement of a superior level of violence by any one party.  Although weak groups may be temporarily scared into ceasing to employ violence to achieve their objectives, they will nurse resentments and try again in the future to gain their way by threats” (49).  Oh, really?  Is this theory of an unending “circle of violence” able to explain the last 60 years of behavior engaged in after the utter defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945?  In order to be a creative generator of theories, Long appears indifferent to inconvenient facts that repudiate them.

This does not preclude Long from making sharp condemnations of specific contemporary policies he does not favor.  Especially, the doctrine of preemption arouses his ire: “Crusade thinking assumes there is an inescapable difference between the civil order within sovereign states and the relationships between them.  Relationships between nations are ultimately based on power, not order.  Only from such an assumption does the idea of preemption make sense.  … the common law does not require turning the other cheek , but it does rule out taking initiatives in starting violence”(90).

Predictably, the book continues through a dark reading of growing violations of civil liberties in over-reaction to the terrorist threat, neatly omitting mention of any of the many terrorist cells broken up within the U.S., 2001-2005.  It concludes with a call for “forgiveness,” asserting that if we had just been more clever, the whole War on Terrorism would have been unnecessary; we should have sought the “rehabilitation of the wrongdoer” (106), rather than the course of war which has been chosen.  Faulting most the campaign in Iraq, Long’s trump card is to charge that the course chosen is one with “all the functional features of imperial domination” (109), as if a short drive on that threadbare retread of 1960s leftists’ insults automatically consigned legally authorized U.S. war policies to the dustbin of history.   Long clearly is at ill-ease when viewing “the new face of dominion (110)”, which should be replaced with “the stance of servanthood” (111) he would prefer.

Of what would this consist?  The outlines Long offers are sketchy, but seem to involve the resurrection of humanitarian intervention and lots of foreign aid.  “To be faithful in the face of terrorism does not consist of having a strategic blueprint for particular actions.  Rather it means embracing a perspective in which patience and confidence enable differences to be reconciled into a diverse whole.  While this precludes giving a single strategy total dominance, it does not preclude taking actions that seek to alleviate antagonisms.  While this precludes seeking a total destruction of evildoers, it does not preclude trying to hold evildoing at bay and to minimize its consequences.  While this precludes assuming that the world must be clobbered into conformity, it does not preclude seeking to unite diverse efforts to improve the human condition” (95-96).  However, no support is heard anywhere in this book for actually increasing border security, sea port screenings of container cargo, or enhanced spending on internal surveillance of suspected terrorists as we “hold evildoing at bay.”  

Indeed, Long is far more concerned that we already have acted too strongly.  “If we curtail freedoms in the process of defending freedom, what is the benefit?  We need a positive resurgence of our noble convictions rather than the embrace of strategies that merely mirror the stances of those we seek to oppose”(96)… “Threats are frequently just as dangerous for the measures people take to eliminate them as for the damages they may directly cause”(98).  Dramatic as that statement is, this reader found offensive the claim that in fighting the war on terrorism, the U.S. has “mirrored” the mass killing of civilians done by our enemies on September 11, 2001.  Even hyperbole must pass a common sense measure: where, Mr. Long, are those deliberately murdered innocents?

The absence of any evidence of widespread war crimes as the state policy of the United States doesn't trouble Long’s analysis.  This is because with Long’s methodology it is sufficient evidence to find any similarity at all in order to stretch argument to a most damning parallel: “To the extent that terrorism expresses dismay over the development of a diverse and complex world, and stems for a religious perspective that seeks to reestablish a simplistic unity of commitment and purpose, terrorism bears a close kinship to the effort of the Christian right in our own country to see that convictional and moral unity is regained” (99-100). 

While this book thus may be the latest rendition on the “blame America first” theme common for two decades in academia, that tradition reaches a new pinnacle in this statement: “When the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked, nothing could have been further from the public mind than to forgive the action and confound the terrorists by doing so.  Such a response might have done much to create the image of a United States totally different from what the terrorists contend it to be.  The empathy of other nations that originally recognized the horror of those attacks and treated the United States as a victim deserving of sympathetic support might have continued.  By reacting as the United States did, it has lost much of that support and even come to be viewed with increasing suspicion and concern, not merely by her enemies but by some of her friends.  What the truculent would regard as wimpish might have been a source of strength” (106).

But Americans crave safety, not empathy, and it is just this craving that Long believes – but provides no evidence to establish as true – is impossible: “The other consequence of seeking to be overly secure is to employ excessive violence against those who are judged to be threats.  It is one thing to deter threats; another to seek the elimination of all danger.  Terrorism by its very nature will never be entirely destroyed.” … “guard against taking actions that are self-defeating” (98)…  “Utopian agendas often lead to demonic excesses” (99).  It is quite clear in these passages that Long was referring not to the demonstrably excessive actions of Al Qaeda but to unidentified (indeed, unidentifiable) things done by the United States.

These are outrageous exaggerations.  Such hyperbole might have seemed reasonable if published shortly after the U.S. firebombing of Dresden, or after the revelations first had surfaced about the Vietnam era's “Operation Phoenix.”  But to what, specifically, does Long refer to find us on the cusp of “demonic” behavior today?  Nothing, not one thing presented in this volume sustains such shrillness, other than the ample hubris of its author.  Long strains to convince us that it is the war policy of the U.S. that brings closer the day that nuclear, or biological, attack on an American city will occur.  This pose is sure to convince those who already believe in Long’s assumptions, and few others.

Susan L. Burns, Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. x + 282pp. Appendix, notes, works cited, index. $23.95, paper, ISBN 0-8223-3172-1, $84.95 cloth, ISBN 0-8223-3183-7.

Reviewed by Daniel A. Metraux

Anthropologist Margaret Mead often commented that the people of any culture experiencing momentous change must have a firm knowledge of their roots and that the loss of this connection to the past can cause problems of self-identity. Contemporary Japan is a fascinating example of a modern culture that is continually striving to define itself through endless studies and debates over what it means to be Japanese. This process, however, is by no means modern, for Japanese scholars as early as the early Edo period have been studying classical Japanese literature and ancient writings with the goal of trying to identify especially Japanese cultural elements or examples of purely Japanese culture. One of the results of this current was the development of a late eighteenth century intellectual movement known as kokugaku (the “study of our country” or “national learning”).

Susan L. Burns, Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago, has provided a superb analytical study of the kokugaku movement before and during the early stages of the Meiji era. Burns’ goal is to analyze how various early modern Japanese scholars began to define Japan as a unique social and cultural identity, the “prehistory of Japanese nationness.” (p. 9). She begins her work with a thorough analysis of Motoori Norinaga’s Kojikiden (Commentaries on the Kojiki), which when completed in 1798 became one of the most important intellectual works of the late Edo period. She then contrasts Norinaga’s ideas with the work of three other contemporary kokugaku scholars, Ueda Akinari, Fujitani Mitsue, and Tachibana Moribe, all of whom variously challenged many of Norinaga’s conclusions and greatly expanded the kokugaku debate.

Burns regards her work as a “case study” of how “a self-consciously modern nationalism was constructed by deploying existing culturalist notions of community.” (p. 225) Even though some scholars date the start of the kokugaku movement to the late seventeenth century, Burns chooses to start her analysis with Norinaga because it was his work which formed the basis of subsequent debate on the idea of Japan. While admitting that her examinations of the work of these kokugaku scholars “represent disparate and, with the excerption of that of Norinaga, discontinuous forms of kokugaku that played no great role in the major histories of nationalism” her study of kokugaku from this perspective reveals “the emergence in the late Tokugawa period of a complex and contentious discourse on the nature of Japan. By interrogating language, textuality, and history, the kokugaku scholars made the early Japanese texts the means to articulate new forms of community that contested the social and political order of their time. Against divisions such as status, regional affinities, and existing collectivities such as domains, towns, and villages, they began to make ‘Japan’ the source of individual and cultural identity.” (p. 220)

Burns’ study of these late Tokugawa writers exposes a gradually expanding debate concerning the nature of Japanese society during what was a tumultuous era marked by profound economic change, growing mobility, increased literacy and the emergence of a burgeoning publication industry and a national media. One sees through Burns’ analysis of the debate among writers like Norinaga, Akinari, Mitsue, and Moribe how inadequate the early Tokugawa concept of a society where social and geographic mobility would be limited had become. Burns’ analysis of the profound differences between the intellectual ideas of these writers exposes the growing intensity of the intellectual ferment of the period.

Burns in her last chapter explores how kokugaku became the basis for efforts by a variety of Meiji era scholars to develop new modern conceptions of nationness within such disciplines as national literature and intellectual history. She examines the work of such modern scholars as Konakamura Kiyonori, Haga Yaichi, and Muraoka Tsunetsugu, who “selected, reorganized, and adapted aspects of kokugaku practice to sustain new conceptions of national character and national culture, a process that necessarily involved attempts to silence concepts of ‘Japan’ that had the potential to challenge the modern version of the nationness. Moreover, the referencing of early modern kokugaku allowed modern scholars to conceal the historical moment that gave rise to the nation and its political exigencies. In other words, the rise of the Meiji state was portrayed as the result of nationalism, rather than nationalism as the product of the nation-state.” (p. 224)

Before the Nation is a work that will best be appreciated by well-trained Japanologists who have a solid background in classical Japanese literature and language. There are extensive quotes in romanized Japanese without English translations that would only be helpful to experienced scholars of Japanese studies.

Susan L. Burns has prepared a thoroughly researched in-depth analysis of the development of kokugaku. She works from a very broad range of original sources and engages in extensive literary analysis of contemporary texts to support her arguments.

Her work is like a brilliant search light that exposes the reader to both the complexity as well as the brilliance of Japanese scholarship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

She introduces us to long forgotten scholars who played a major role in shaping the modern concept of the Japanese state. Before the Nation is one of those rare feats of scholarship that should become mandatory reading for any student of pre-modern and modern Japanese history and politics.

Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.

Isbn: 0-374-52591-9. Paper $14.00

Reviewed by Tromila Wheat

Sunil Khilnani's The Idea of India purports to offer a snapshot of India and illustrate
what makes India a successful nation-state today. Through the analysis of four aspects of Indian society, Khilnani presents a complex picture of India’s rich history since indepen-dence. Each of these features gives the reader a more complete picture of India itself. Though one should never presume to have gained complete knowledge of a place or a culture from reading a single book, The Idea of India does provide a brief survey of an incredibly diverse country that has defied many odds in order to become the rising nation state that it is today.

The new introduction by the author brings the subject precisely into focus for the reader. Since India gained its independence in 1947, it has struggled to remain a free, independent and viable nation, and Khilnani believes this struggle is most obvious in Indian efforts in politics and economics. Discussing the rich cultural diversity of India, Khilnani demonstrates many of the difficulties in maintaining a successful democracy in such a varied land, yet he says that this very diversity is what holds the country together. One of the starkest barriers to India's democratic success is the subject of the second half of Khilnani's introduction on the nation’s economy. India has managed to survive as a democracy even though a majority of its people live in poverty with little, if any, immediate hope of overcoming it. However, despite its economic strife and possibly because of its political diversity, India has managed to endure as a democracy to this day, and Khilnani chooses to begin with this point in order to introduce some general ideas.

Khilnani goes to great lengths to demonstrate that India was not born as a democratic

nation. Indeed, he details that, politically, India had no democratic history until independence in 1947 due to the autocratic nature of British rule. India’s struggle for nationhood was further hampered by the fact that it had never fully been united as an entire subcontinent under British rule. Therefore, modern India’s founding fathers had to establish the rules of living together as a political and economic unit. Nehru was one of the most influential figures in this process, as he was a strong proponent of the idea of collective liberty, where the individual did not necessarily hold the West's values so highly but held the idea that the nation-state of India has the right to rule itself. This idea of collective liberty helped to solve the problem of social inequality because under collective identity there could be the "one man, one vote, one value" policy so that everyone was politically equal without having to alter the social structure. However, especially after the election of Indira Gandhi in 1965, this emphasis on voting caused the democracy of India to focus almost completely on elections so that little was done between them, except by the politicians. This factor led to the develop-

ment of open elections, but did not bring about a strong civil society that would have

strengthened India as a whole.

In the following chapter Khilnani illustrates that the economic viability of India depends very much on the strength of its democracy. Democratic strengths like a free, independent press and an open opposition in Parliament and in elections have allowed the country to remain free from economic catastrophes such as widespread famine, and regular elections ensure that politicians do not enact any substantial inflationary policies. The economy of India is itself divided, and it is difficult to determine an economic policy for the whole state because there are so many regional areas that want their own control. However, one of the most important characteristics inherited from the British Empire was the small state budget, and India has managed to continue in that vein. With more efficient management, the Indian economy has the potential to grow quickly.

Although it is clear through the first chapters that the political climate and the economy are important in defining India, Khilnani grasps and conveys the idea that India is much more than just a political and economic system. He describes the impact that Indian cities have had on Indian society, beginning with the idea that Indian cities were not a creation of the British Empire, but their present state has been greatly influenced by it. Cities existed in India before the British came although many of these cities were built for very specific purposes like holidays, holy shrines, and pilgrimages. Yet there were cities like Ahmedabad that were completely Indian-built cultural and economic centers that flourished even after the British artificially built their port factory facilities. These cities were often microcosms of Indian culture as each city was divided by caste, and the people strictly adhered to the social structure. However, it would be unreasonable to believe that the British left existing Indian cities wholly unchanged. The British saw the filth that dominated Indian cities and used their efficient infrastructure to build drainage and sewer systems. Nehru then moved the cities further into the modem era with architects like Le Corbusier, setting the stage for cities like Bangalore to become one of the centers with the greatest international investment rates and Bombay to become the city of modem Indian culture. Khilnani shows that even though the cities have changed over the years, they still retain the distinct individuality of Indian cities and demonstrate much of idea of India.

However, Khilnani understands that India could never be India without its very diverse population, but this diversity yields the question as to who is really an Indian. The
author addresses this exact question in his final chapter and admits that an exact answer is still
unavailable. He discusses how Indianness is still difficult to define but shows that in the years
since independence many have tried. Gandhi and Nehru were the first two to make serious and relatively successful attempts at defining who or what is an Indian. Gandhi believed that history was irrelevant and that the people should unite under a political willingness to get rid of the British and determine their own independence. He did not separate religion from politics but saw different religions as an integral part of the Indian identity.

As the first Prime Minister, Nehru had to unite his country to keep it together. Even

though he idealized and romanticized the history of India, he brought the country together by

appealing to the struggles they had been through together. He recognized that they had differences by recognizing so many different languages and states, but he called them to unity in their diversity. After the era of Nehru and Gandhi, the questions still had not been decided, but the divisions became sharper as people no longer embraced their differences as diversity but instead invoked their religions to separate from one another. It was here that states began to demand autonomy based on language and religion, and since then divisions have only grown. Regional leaders do not want to dissolve the union but would much prefer a confederation where they were in power and the people identified themselves according to their region rather than according to the fact that they are Indian. Khilnani demonstrates that the question of Indian identity is still as difficult to define as it ever was.

As a whole The Idea of India is a logically presented glimpse at what makes India the
country it is today. The organization of the book makes comprehension of the information easier. Because the author took a single attribute, described it, and then showed how it related to Indian society as a whole, by the end of the book the reader could easily understand how the facets of Indian society intertwine to create this beautiful, unique culture. The book is not a dry recitation of information but is a colorful expression of ideas that opens the reader's thoughts to a place that most have never seen and could barely imagine. The Idea of India is not a comprehensive discussion of the country of India but an adequate overview like one may get from spending the day walking through a forest rather than a year studying its trees. In the same way, the beauty and intricacies of India still become apparent through this brief introduction to the country and culture.

Annie R. Wang: Lili: A Novel of Tiananmen. New York: Pantheon Books, 2001

Reviewed by Constance Fletcher Smith

Chinese writers abroad are just beginning to tell the story of Tiananmen Square in literature. Only three works to date address those historic events, and all three come from outside China. One is Summer of Betrayal (1997) by Hong Ying, a Beijing native living in London. The most recent, Sons of Heaven (2002), is by Terrence Cheng, born in Taiwan but living most of his life in New York. The third and most impressive is Annie Wang’s novel Lili: A Novel of Tiananmen (Pantheon Books) published in 2001.

Annie Wang herself witnessed the events of Tiananmen Square in 1989 when she

was a student at a high school located two blocks away. When she visited Mary Washington College recently, she admitted that it was “her summer of love,” that she went to the square mostly to “meet cool guys.” The fervor of the atmosphere was a “turn on;” everybody was talking or performing, with an immediate audience. At the same time, she knew that the events had historic significance, and she had to explore her “exquisite pain, the urge to scream” and to tell the story of the death of idealism in China. She took ten years to complete the novel, her first in English.

Born in 1972 in the ancient Chinese capital Xi’an, Wang graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1996. She has worked for the Beijing bureau of The Washington Post and works now as an interpreter for the U. S. State Department. She has studied English since she was thirteen and helped, as a radio talk show hostess, to introduce many western works, including Catcher in the Rye, The Diary of Anne Frank, and On the Road to her contemporaries in China. She is currently working on a second novel about “the cynical, urban Americanization of China.”

Wang’s background as a writer is extensive. She has published widely in Chinese from the age of fourteen; in fact, she has written more that 1,000 pieces in China, including feature articles and prose essays. She chose to write Lili in English because she finds English free of some of the taboos and constraints of Chinese; she calls it “sexy.” She did not want to offend or hurt her parents, but she says of the novel that it was her “cry of rebellion, her manifesto,” and she has been criticized for “biting the hand that feeds her” since her father is an official in the Chinese government. She couldn’t help adding, with a little affected fear, that her parents are now learning English.

Over the ten years she devoted to her writing (while her friends were working in Napa Valley, getting MBAs and making lots of money), she created a nuanced portrait of the awakening of her heroine as well as of her country. Lili, a common name in China, is symbolic. The flower, important as a symbol of purity in English, is also the lotus so significant in Buddhism. Almost inexpressibly beautiful, it has its roots in the mud, the ugliness of Lili’s past and the Proletarian Cultural Revolution itself.

In Lili: a Novel of Tiananmen, Wang tells the raw story of a young,

disillusioned heroine growing up in a turbulent modern China. Her parents, both accomplished professional musicians, suffer during the Cultural Revolution. The family is sent away for “re-education” to rural Monkey Village, where a minor official rapes Lili when she is twelve years old. The village is called “Monkey,” Wang says, because in order for people to live as human beings, they need to have dignity; here, the villagers live like animals. The rape is of course symbolic of the crime against China of the Cultural Revolution.

As Lili escapes and makes her way back to become a “comfort woman” for a street gang in Beijing, she loses more and more of her ability to be truly emotionally invested in life or to have any self-esteem. When the novel opens, she is in prison for hooliganism and “a corrupt lifestyle,” and she encrusts herself with a “don’t give a shit” attitude, expressed in sometimes ugly slang, that distances her at first from the reader’s sympathies but rings very true to life.

Wang tells Lili’s story in a style made up of simple, uncomplex sentences that contain deceptively powerful metaphors and images. The poetic soul of the main character thoroughly captivates even the most jaded and cynical reader through her exquisite command of language, especially simile. For example, Lili decides to play music for money at a hotel for rich patrons. (Her parents could hardly be more shocked if she prostituted herself.) In preparation for her job, she dusts off her erhu (a Chinese violin), and plucks a sound. “The sound is the cry of an ancient concubine, abandoned by her king for ages. I am the king who has dumped my erhu concubine. But she has waited patiently for my return.”

The images of her poetic sensibility make her prose redolent with pure beauty.

The notes of her erhu when she visits Mongolia “penetrate the open air, flying boundless, like nightingales.” A memory departs “like a whiff of fading fragrance, something you can never grab or see again but that still stimulates your senses.” A couple strolls “hand in hand, like a pair of lost school children. Only our shadows follow us, loyal, speechless” A room looks dull and pale; “I feel like a sad bird in the wrong climate.”

Wang’s genius follows Lili as she reluctantly comes to love an ex-hippie Jewish American journalist – and herself. She struggles with Roy’s preconceptions of China (though he is fluent in Chinese), his western linear and dualistic thinking, his idealism and what she calls his naiveté. As he pursues his “research” relentlessly, she drifts intellectually, claiming not to know what the word ‘love’ means, let alone the word ‘democracy.’

One brilliant vignette from the novel that captures cultural clash is their visit to Lili’s mother’s mother, an old woman with an involved and colorful past who is now a devout Buddhist and a recluse. The novel tells her story briefly. When she was young, nicknamed Party Queen, her first love was an officer. Her parents married her to a wealthy opium addict she did not love. The rest of her story unfolds with similar tragedy until she is struggled against during the Cultural Revolution and denounced, even slapped and spat upon by her own daughter and granddaughter.

Roy, curious about everything, wants to learn something about Buddhism, so he and Lili go to visit this extraordinary woman. When he meets her, he asks in the Western way of questioning: “Grandma, I want to know what ‘Om mani padme hum’ means to a Buddhist like you. Are the syllables energy-based sounds? When you chant the mantra, it produces an actual physical vibration. Does the vibration match the level of your energy? How about your mental intention when you chant? Are you very focused when chanting? Do the six syllables bring you peace and connect you with the deity?”

Grandma calmly continues fanning herself, then takes a sip of her tea and responds, ‘Truth, without words.’”

Throughout the novel, Wang presents Lili as a young woman who would rather not think deeply or be drawn into life in any profound or rigorous way that demands effort. Once when Roy is absent, she decides she will learn some English while he is gone. She pulls a volume of The Birth of Tragedy off his shelf and starts reading it, with a Chinese-English dictionary. “But knowing little of English grammar, I can’t tell whether the title means that giving birth is tragic or that a tragedy is being born.”

This kind of assumed shallowness and ignorance on Lili’s part permeates the novel. She remains reluctant to engage fully in life. She claims not to know what the word ‘democracy’ means, or what it means to be caught up in something larger than oneself. But as the inexorable outcome of Tiananmen Square juggernauts on, she spends every day at the Square, participating in the events that Roy is documenting. She takes notes like a journalist herself, and she serves as a nurse until she is exhausted. She makes us feel that we are right there with her, involved in events of profound importance on the stage of the modern world.

The ending of the novel is deliberately ambiguous. Resisting cliché, Wang prefers the Chinese way, “vague, ambiguous, and beautiful. It’s not a multiple choice question with only one right answer.” Yet by the time readers come to this ending, they have come to know Beijing hooligans, rural Chinese peasants, creative artists, frustrated parents, Communist Chinese officials, and many more. All appear with the vividness and clarity of truth; it is a surprise to realize one is reading fiction. This novel filters everything through the viewpoint and words of the title character, a tough young woman who tells a story of modern China with surprising depth, power, and poetry.

Susumu Shimazono, From Salvation to Spirituality: Popular Religious Movements in Modern Japan. Melbourne, Australia: Trans Pacific Press, 2004. ISB: 1-876843-13-6 Paper. $US 34.95

Reviewed by Daniel A. Metraux

Susumu Shimazono, a professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Tokyo, is one of the foremost scholars of the contemporary religious scene in Japan. His research and writing on Aum Shinrikyo have provided fascinating insights into the growth and thinking of this extraordinary movement and his vast number of publications on Japan’s New Religions and Japanese religious history stretching from the 1970s has provided Japanese and foreign scholars with an incredibly rich goldmine of material to help them with their own research.

Shimazazono’s most recent English-language publication, From Salvation to Spirituality: Popular Religious Movements in Modern Japan, is a rich anthology of his articles on Japan’s religions written between 1981 and 2003. The introduction and sixteen chapters of this volume previously appeared in such journals as the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, the Journal of Oriental Studies, the Journal of Alternative Religion and Culture, and Social Compass, as well as chapters in various edited anthologies on Japanese religion.

Shimazono’s focus in this book is on the phenomenal growth of Japan’s New Religions since the Meiji era and of more recent New Spiritual Movements and Culture in Japan. He examines the reasons for their popular appeal, the impact that they have had on Japanese culture and on the evolution of contemporary Japanese society, and on the spread of these movements abroad. He believes this work is especially important because today roughly half of Japan’s actively religious practitioners are involved with the New Religions and Spirituality activities and that these movements are having a profound effect on contemporary Japanese society.

The book is divided into five distinct sections. A lengthy introduction provides a very useful overview of the development of Japan’s New Religions from the earliest, Nyoraikyoo, a group that emerged in the early nineteenth century, to the evolution of the “Spiritual World” since the 1980s. The first section, “Japan’s New Religions in the Broader Scheme,” examines the role of New Religions and the sociology of religion in Japan, the religious influences that these religions have had on Japan’s modernization since the Meiji era, and the role that “salvation religions” play in modern society. The second section consists of three excellent chapters on “Lotus Sutra-Based New Religions” and the influence of the Nichiren School on a variety of Japan’s more prominent religious organizations including the Soka Gakkai.

Part III provides perspectives on a wide variety of New Religions and “Spiritual Movements” that have grown in prominence in Japan over the past two to three decades.

Topics include the diverse trends of Millenialism in modern Japanese religious history, the growth of “New Spirituality Movements” in Japan including “naturalistic religiosity”

(which includes such factors as “alternative knowledge movements (AKMs),” “alternative medicine,” and “alternative agriculture” and “AKMs and new spirituality movements”) and a broad discussion of the growth of psychotherapeutic religion in Japan.”

Part IV, “Religions and Spiritual Movements After the 1970s,” looks at the growth of “New New Religions” and “Spirituality” in the 1980s and beyond, the spread of Japan’s New Religions abroad, a comparison of the major distinctions between the New Religions such as the Soka Gakkai that came of age in the immediate postwar era and those which grew in prominence in the 1970s, 1980s and beyond, and two final chapters, “New Spirituality Movements and the Spiritual Intellectuals” and “’New Age Movements’ or ‘New Spirituality Movements and Culture.’”

Since I have been studying the Soka Gakkai movement since the mid-1970s, I am especially interested in Shimazono’s 1999 article, “Soka Gakkai and the Modern Reformation of Buddhism.” Here Smizono’s prefaces his work with the question, “In a world of rapid change, progressively urbanized and information-intensive, what transformations are taking place in Buddhist practice and in the community?” (p. 109)

What follows is a lengthy discussion of the doctrines developed by Toda Josei (1900-1958), who rebuilt the Soka Gakkai after World War II, on the “Doctrine of Life Force.”

Shimazono states that Toda’s idea of life-force was a significant move away from the theology of the Nichiren Shoshu sect and of the Gakkai’s founder, Makiguchi Tsunesaburo (1871-1944). Shimazono writes that what is of supreme interest here is how this idea of life-force “reshaped the traditional teachings of Nichiren Shoshu in the direction of a belief in this-worldly salvation that is typical of popular Buddhist movements in East Asia in the modern period.” (pp. 110-111).

This rich volume belongs in the library of every serious student of modern Japan because of the wealth of truly scholarly information and insights not only on present-day Japanese religion, but also on contemporary Japanese society as a whole. The diversity of topics discussed in considerable depth and wisdom is quite phenomenal.

The only minor faults of the book lie in its status of a collected anthology of articles written over a span of more than two decades. Despite the fact that the editors have carefully grouped the chapters in terms of topic, the transitions between articles at times can be rather rough. Some of the chapters are also a bit dated. The piece on Japanese new religions abroad was published in 1991 and no apparent effort has been made to update the article. Much has happened to these religions abroad since the early 1990s and some of these developments should have been noted here.

Despite these minor flaws, this volume by Professor Shimazono is an invaluable resource for every scholar in the field.

Win Naing Oo. Hidden Records of Atrocities in Burma’s Prisons. Thailand: AAPP, 2002.

Reviewed by Lin Lin Aung

[Note: The book reviewed here is written entirely in Burmese. The English title was translated by the reviewer]

Win Naing Oo’s new book, Hidden Records of Atrocities in Burma’s Prisons, published in Burmese, is essentially a personal memoir of the author’s days in infamous Insein Prison where he was once held as a political prisoner. He has carefully portrayed the atrocities of the Burmese military regime in prisons imposed upon political prisoners. His book gives one insights into the military rule in Burma and the hypocrisy being developed by the ruling junta in the international community.

Win Naing Oo’s book is very valuable and important to Burma’s history in many ways since it reveals the hidden records of atrocities and the institution of torture operated by the current ruling military regime. It is moving, inspiring, sad, provocative, and laudable to realize the ill-treatment and physical and mental torture that these peace loving people are going through while fighting for democracy. 

The very fact that the author himself went through these unpleasant experiences makes this book very unique and valuable. He was a university student and a student activist in 1988 when people were calling for an end to 26 years of military one-party rule. He went underground when the current military regime took over and resumed his political work. He was arrested in 1990 and sentenced to 3 year imprisonment. He has recalled his experience on the day he was arrested as follows: 

It was midnight when the Military Intelligence Personnel came to take me without warrant. I was handcuffed at the back, hooded, and beaten while the gun was pointed at me in their car. When we got to the Military Interrogation Center, I was thrown into a room while kept handcuffed and hooded. I had a premonition that my passion for freedom would be tested. One hour later, I learned that a group of people rushed in and began to reprimand me for what I had done, kick me with their military boots, and beat me right in my face. The blood was coming down from my nose and eyes. Upon my repudiation to surrender, they continued to try to extract information out of me by using such torture methods as unsystematic beatings, near suffocation, electric shocks. It was so painful that I wish I lost my consciousness. I was most disturbed by the deep and loud cries of my friends from other rooms resulting from various torture methods. I was deprived of food and water during four days of interrogation.

According to Win Naing Oo, tortures are institutionalized in interrogation centers and prisons in Burma. They are practiced by the Military Intelligence Personnel, prison guards and police. They use various physical torture methods to extract information, instill fear in anyone critical of the government, break down the identity of a strong man or woman and destroy their souls.  

Win Naing Oo was subsequently sentenced to a 3-year imprisonment without any proper trial. His 3- year experience in Insein prison was filled with harshness, resentment and bitterness. According to the author, an extremely poor diet is served and there are no qualified doctors, proper medical care and sanitation in prisons despite the UN Geneva Convention. On top of all, the prison doctors intentionally use the same needle to have prisoners of conscience being exposed to HIV and other transmitted diseases. Skin diseases, tuberculosis and other diseases are very common. Anyone who complains is punished severely to deter future complaints of the mismanagement. Overcrowding is one of the many issues and over one hundred people are assigned to stay in one tiny room where no sheet or blanket is provided. Prisoners of conscience are not allowed to read and write or even have a writing paper or pen. Moreover, they are not allowed to meet their family on a regular basis. In some cases, families do not know where they are being kept. 

Win Naing Oo recalls and explains many forms of severe physical punishments that he went through in Insein Prison. One of punishment is when prisoners are forced to maintain difficult positions for prolonged periods, known as “pone san.” They are severely beaten when they fail or if the prison wardens find faults in their positions. This is essentially one of the ways they use to instill fear in political prisoners who are critical of government and to destroy their souls. Another form of punishment is “taik peik,” where prisoners are held in a solitary confinement in shackles with little light or ventilation for many months. Some prisoners, both men and women, lose their minds or commit suicide as a result. Many others suffer from insomnia, nightmares, and severe depression after experiencing torture. Several died in custody. Many political prisoners are sent to labor camps breaking stones or constructing roads in shackles while being exposed to life threatening diseases. Most of those sent to these camps are died from overwork, exhaustion, ill treatment, lack of food and medical care.

The author discloses widespread corruption and acts of homosexuality inflicted by male criminals who are allowed to harass political prisoners in Burma’s prisons. Buddhist monks who have gone against the military government are imprisoned, denied an access to wear robes, and are obliged to stay in overcrowded rooms. Moreover, these respectable monks are tortured, dishonored, sent to labor camps and died from exhaustion and ill treatment. Sadly, women political prisoners are brutally tortured, kept in solitary confinement, and repeatedly raped by the prison police.

Robert Whiting, The Meaning of Ichiro: The New Weave from Japan and the Transformation of our National Pastime. New York: Warner Books, 2004.

ISBN: 0446531928

Reviewed by Daniel A. Metraux

I attended a Japanese baseball game at the Osaka Dome during Golden Week 1999 with my son David featuring the pennant-contending Orix Blue Wave. There was one player, Ichiro Suzuki, who absolutely amazed us. I had never heard of Ichiro, but neither of us will ever forget his performance that day: 6 hits in six at bats, several great catches and amazing throws from right field to home plate to nail players trying to score on sacrifice flies. It was an amazing performance, but I remember thinking how he would melt when facing Major League pitching back home! I saw Ichiro yet again playing for the woeful Seattle Mariners at Safeco Field in Seattle in early June, 2005. He was almost as good as in 1999: He collected three hits in five at bats and broke up a Toronto Blue Jay rally with a spectacular catch in right field and an incredible throw home that easily beat a Toronto runner streaking from third.

Robert Whiting’s fascinating book, The Meaning of Ichiro, explores the role-reversal in talent that once saw aging American stars finish their careers in Japan’s professional baseball leagues. Today Japan’s baseball stars are performing miracles for American teams. The first Japanese star was Hideo Nomo, who became an instant all-star and rookie of the year in the mid-1990, followed by Hideki Irabu, Kasuhisa Ishi, Hideki Matsui, and, of course, Ichiro himself. Some Japanese players like Ichiro and Matsui have performed brilliantly, others like Irabu enjoyed moderate success, while a few have been total failures. Those who have had some success have become national heroes in Japan and highly respected players in North America.

These successes have also brought great national pride to a nation that has had few heroes in the postwar era. They are playing an American game and their home-grown talent is as good if not better than that found in Major League Baseball. These successes has raised Japanese self-confidence in other sports and may be partially responsible for Japanese success on international playing fields of soccer and other sports. Some Japanese have told me that these successes have also diminished feelings of inferiority that some of their countrymen have had in their feelings about the West.

Whiting’s book is also a well-written comparison of American and Japanese culture through the venue of baseball. The author provides excellent in-depth biographies of the major players including detailed descriptions of their lives playing under the rigid supervision of Japanese management and their feelings of both freedom and isolation when playing on an American squad.

Whiting’s The Meaning of Ichiro is a solid, well-researched study of an important area in US-Japanese relations. The author has a solid grasp of the game and is able to convey his story in a manner that even the most ivory-tower-bound Japanologist would appreciate.

Akira Yoshimura, One Man’s Justice. San Diego: Harcourt, 2002. Isbn: 015-6007258

Reviewed by Daniel A. Metraux

Akira Yoshimura’s intense thriller, One Man’s Justice, takes place in Japan immediately following Tokyo’s surrender to the United States in World War II. The main character, Takuya, a recently discharged officer of the Japanese army, is fleeing Occupation authorities in hot pursuit of suspected war criminals. Takuya as an officer had played a leading role in the incarceration and execution of American fliers. Takuya does not consider himself to be a war criminal—he had followed orders and had disposed of flyers from an enemy country that had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and had fire-bombed other cities such as Tokyo and Osaka, killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians.

The major attraction of this book is the portrait it gives of occupied Japan. Yoshimura does a superb job in recounting the hunger, depression and sense of hopelessness that many Japanese of that era felt. The character of Takuya is a bit shallow—one feels little empathy for him because Yoshimura never really develops his personality sufficiently. But there is a growing sense of suspense throughout the book as Takuya stays one step ahead of American authorities. This is one of those books that a baseball addict such as myself cannot put down.

Yoshimura asks some burning questions: What is victor’s justice? Is it just?

Are soldiers in any army who kill innocent civilians themselves not guilty of murder?

Is it right to try, convict and even execute soldiers who followed orders in defense of their country? Why should an honest and dutiful man be prosecuted by the very people who used atomic weapons on helpless civilians? Wasn’t the United States itself not guilty of racial genocide in its bombing of Japan?

Unfortunately, we hear nothing of the millions of Chinese, Koreans, other Asians and Allied troops massacred by the Japanese. Foreigners visiting the museums at Hiroshima are often shocked at Japan’s “We were the true sufferers” mentality. Never-theless, One Man’s Justice is an interesting exploration of the last stages of the Pacific War and the early part of the Occupation from a Japanese perspective.