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part of the colonial or ‘semi-colonial’ world. East Asia, in fact, proved the ultimate test of Europe’s capacity to construct a stable and co-operative colonial order. As several chapters graphically describe, it was the intervention of Japan, the dynamic new, but curiously ambivalent, member of the imperial club, which was the decisive factor in the fate of the imperial project and of the imperial communities which had grown up around it. Imperialism and empire are abstractions. To study them only through the correspondence
arisen mainly from dissensions within societies that have emerged from what Ronald H. Spector has termed ‘the ruins of empire’:3 British, French, Belgian, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese and latterly Soviet. This chapter explores how four artists in Asia – Yoshiko Shimada from Japan, Sri Lankan artist Jagath Weerasinghe, Indonesian artist FX Harsono, and Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê – have engaged with such issues in their art. The work of these artists follows a long tradition of art about war and conflict over the centuries. One early example among many in Asia can be
5 Hironen and the representation of the other The objects designed in Japan between 1987 and 1995 by the designer duo Ronen Levin and Ōkawa Hiroyuki under the brand name Hironen sometimes look like a surrealist hallucination. Each of the objects is one of a kind, and they are presented in theatrical phantasmagorical scenes replete with all the objects needed for the total design of a space: armchairs, sofas, tables, chests of drawers, lamps, carpets, paintings, decorative artefacts, tableware, and even jewellery. Each of the objects demonstrates radical
contemporary artists who were active in conceptual art and neo-Dadaist circles at that time. The programme also included the work of John Cage, and caused the first tremors of so-called ‘Cage-Shock’ to reverberate through Japan’s avant-garde community. Ono had initially met Cage in New York, through her marriage to Toshi Ichiyanagi (one of his former students), and he had attended the Chambers Street ‘loft concerts’ she had organised with La Monte Young. Other associates of Cage who performed in that 1962–64 season at SAC included David Tudor, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper
7 Regulatory transformation and the core executive Japan and its politics has long been a significant topic of research. With the emergence of observers highlighting the transformation of the state after the 1980s, the nature and transformation of the Japanese state of the period offers a timely contribution to understanding governance and public policy scholarship. The case studies in Part II explicitly disclose the significance of the core executive as key to explaining governance and regulation, with its unusual approach based on the conventional process
perpetrators. Ankoku butoh, literally the ‘dance of utter darkness’, was first performed in Japan by Tatsumi Hijikata and then developed by Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno (among others) into a global dance practice. Featuring dancers whose bodies appear as if they were cadavers refusing to die, butoh was born of death, or of many deaths: the death of a Japanese culture that was, in 1959, entering into a
encompasses a particular, historically determined and normatively held concept of security, and which emphasizes the importance of sovereign independence. 1 For the states in the region, the range of complex security problems today is underpinned by military and nuclear fears: from China’s nuclear arms, Japan’s potential for nuclear weapons, North Korea’s nuclear threat, to
6 Breaking the egg shell The JFTC’s independence is an unusual feature within Japan’s political tradition. As demonstrated by the 1977 AMA amendment, the commission’s independence emerged as a notable element that characterised policy-making in anti-monopoly regulation (Beeman 2002). Elsewhere, the prioritisation of the sector after the 1990s gradually changed the conditions surrounding and shaping anti-monopoly regulation. This change had the potential to reframe the JFTC and the sector, including the commission’s independence and state capacity within the
Hirohito shows how the Japanese sovereign faced the loss of a war, an overseas empire and his political powers, as well as American post-war occupation of Japan. 5 Kobkua Suwannathat-Pian has explained how the sultans of the Malay states successfully managed the transition from colonial rule to independence and beyond, and John Monfries has profiled the late Sultan of Yogyakarta, a rare Indonesian hereditary ruler whose throne survived republican independence. 6 Bruce Lockhart has chronicled the decline of the Vietnamese monarchy (which did not long survive the Second
of American gothic and the overlapping transition to a globalgothic in which America is but a part leads me to discuss two canonical, antebellum-era American gothic texts, and one contemporary instance with close ties to these, concluding with a final example of a globalgothic ‘America’ made in Japan. Each suggests the American nation state to be built atop unstable foundations, as representatives of