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This article explores a reactionary, and ultimately failed, medical dietary movement that sought to counter the influence of Western nutritional sciences at the turn of the twentieth century. Its supporters looked to the early modern past to create a vision of traditional Japanese foodways based on whole grains, unpolished rice, and locally grown vegetables, a nutritional regimen they called cerealism. In articulating a Japanese national diet, cerealism offered a new promise to not only recapture Japan's food culture but its national subjectivity by envisioning native eating habits that could build both superior physique and quality of character. The intrusion of the Western staples of bread and meat, supporters feared, could cause the downfall of the Japanese nation on bodily, spiritual, and economic grounds. Cerealism thus sought to upend the universal claims of Western medical science by posing a simple question: Was there such a thing as Japanese nutrition? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the summer of 1950, American political scientist Wesley Fishel met the Japanese writer and political activist Komatsu Kiyoshi who introduced the professor to the Vietnamese nationalist leaders Cuong De and Ngo Dinh Diem. This encounter had great importance for Fishel's career as he became one of the early U.S. specialists on Vietnam as well as an academic who actively sought to influence US. policy in Vietnam. The talks also presented Diem with the opportunity to widen his contacts with Americans who could help him in his effort to become the leader of an independent Vietnam. This article describes Fishel's meetings with the Vietnamese as well as Komatsu's attempts to promote their political fortunes. It also discusses the consequences that these discussions had for the individuals involved, especially Diem and Fishel, as well as the shared conviction of Komatsu and Fishel that foreign powers could play a constructive role in guiding Vietnam toward independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract In March 2005, riots erupted in South Korea against Japan in reaction to Japan's claims of sovereignty over some rocky uninhabited islets (0.23 km2). What explains the moral outrage against Japan, the severity of which could have erupted into a military conflict? Such outrage is a puzzle for two reasons. First, the probability that South Korea could defeat Japan is nil, especially since the US-Japan alliance dominates the US-South Korean alliance. Second, even if the probability of defeating Japan was 100%, the net benefit of conflict was apparently negative - given the meager potential reward vis-à-vis the cost of war. This article offers a rational choice model that demonstrates that the moral outrage cannot be explained as a strategic threat. The analysis demonstrates that sociological and evolutionary game explanations are also unconvincing. This calls for an evaluation of how emotions relate to rational choice in international conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the strategic manipulation of national Red Cross Societies as markers of sovereignty during a period of heightened world nationalism in the early twentieth century. Using Chinese archival materials, it examines how in 1916, on China's much contested Shandong Peninsula, a Japanese delegation set up a Japanese Red Cross chapter and hospital in the Chinese port city of Longkou, in flagrant disregard of widely recognized principles of sovereignty and international law. Occurring just as the larger 'Shandong Question' was roiling the international legal community, this incident shows how the local practice of international legal statutes diverged from a more publicized, transnational discussion of those same principles. The article explores this disjuncture, and considers one instance of what I term the differentiated practice of international law: the early twentiethcentury Japanese 'double policy' - 'one policy for the East and another for the West.' Revealing much about the use of humanitarian activity and the laws of war to further national agendas, the Longkou Incident was later used by the Chinese Red Cross Society as precedent for checking further incursions into China's sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1970s, overseas Chinese students in the United States protested against Japan's claim to the Diaoyutai Islands. Emerging at a time when the rivalry between the Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan and the People's Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland to represent China was at a critical juncture, the movement soon found itself caught up in the struggle between the two sides. It was out of the Protect Diaoyutai Movement that a new ideological constituent of overseas Chinese nationalism came to light, looking to the PRC as the hope for a sovereign China. It became a predominant force among overseas Chinese activists and the movement changed its direction from defending Diaoyutai to seeking Taiwan's reunification with the mainland. The paper discusses the factors that shaped and eventually radicalized the movement. It asserts that the event was a turning point in the evolution of overseas Chinese nationalism which transformed an undercurrent into a surging tide that gave rise to a new Chinese national identity among overseas Chinese in America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1947 has not been sufficiently understood as a narrative in its own right, but rather, as a transitional conflict between Nationalist and Communist rule. The examination of the visual imagery of warfare disseminated through newsprint and books is one way to reinterpret the history of this period. Through a close reading of images printed in a Shanghai newspaper, Zhonghua ribao, during the final days of the battle for the city in 1937, we see how the news was shaped to impose a narrative of order with a positive teleology at a time when China was plunged into chaos with no guarantee of the eventual outcome of the war. The nature of this narrative is explored through examination of images of the body, as well as the positioning of images in the context of the printed page. The conclusion then contrasts these images with a pictorial history of the Sino-Japanese War published during the Civil War, in 1947. It suggests that although this book is able to bring narrative closure to the earlier conflict, its own narrative is imbued with an unease caused by the reality of the new war that had broken out within months of the ending of the war against Japan, and suggests that narrative closure is never truly obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the strategic framework of action of Subhas Chandra Bose for the liberation of India and how his ideas about international collaboration for the overthrow of British imperialism took shape despite the constraints and limitations imposed by the existing framework of the national moment as conceived by Gandhi and the restrictions imposed by the colonial rulers. An attempt is made in this paper to analyse how his collaboration with Japan directly or indirectly accelerated the pace of nationalism during and after the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The northernmost border of Japan's informal empire were the Mongol lands and Manchuria. For nearly a century this region lay on the borders between an expanding Russia and a retreating China and was a major area for Japanese ambitions on the Asian mainland. Japan's interest in the Mongol lands (including Manchuria) was spurred by general strategic, economic and ideological factors, and was justified by an academic discourse on geopolitics. Geo-political socialisation was carried out in respective areas and Mongol nationalism was drawn into these affairs. This paper examines the reasons for Japan's interest in these areas, and the arguments used to justify this expansionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]