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Une modernite indigene: Ruptures et innovations dans les theories politiques japonaise du xviiie siecle (An indigenous modernity: Discontinuity and innovation in eighteenth-century Japanese political theory). By Olivier Ansart. Collection Japon, [...]

A list of contributors for the current issue of the journal is presented, with brief biographical information, including Olivier Ansart, Janet Borland, and Hugh Clarke.

Kaiho Seiryo (1755-1817) is probably the first Japanese thinker to proclaim the contractual nature of human relationships. I examine in this paper the view of human beings that led him to this conclusion. Giving up previous definitions of humans, Seiryo focuses on the faculty of practical reason. While this leads him to recognize a hierarchy of humans, some having more humanity than others, it also allows him to develop the most modern understanding of social relationship available in his time. His radical reinterpretation of what it is to be a human being is all the more remarkable because it was done with the concepts and ideas provided by the Chinese Classics. Establishing new connections, giving new life to ideas that were never exploited, Seiryo showed it was possible to make sense of modernity without using foreign concepts.

Phenomena like the happiness of the wicked or the misfortune of the worthies were for Confucian thinkers, just as for Christian theologians, puzzles that their ‘theories on fortune and misfortune’, just like Theodicies in the West, were trying, with some difficulty, to explain or rationalize. This article first surveys some standard explanations of the phenomena given by scholars of eighteenth-century Japan within the framework of the available monist, rationalist paradigms. Afterward, it turns to another type of representation of the world that could answer the puzzles—not, it should be stressed, by solving them, but rather by dis-solving them: by making them disappear as problems. In this new representation, for which many inhabitants of industrialized societies today have much affinity, the world in which humans live is ruled by many independent and mutually irreducible rationalities—economic, productive, military, moral (under various forms), political, physical, etc. If humans view the world in such manner, they are certainly confronted by many questions—for example the need to order or prioritize those logics in order to achieve an overarching order—but they are delivered at least of one burden: the necessity to justify scandals like the happiness of the wicked. Most such tragedies arise then simply from the encounter of different rationalities qua independent rationalities: say, the encounter of the physical laws that produce devastating earthquakes with the moral principles that lead us to attach value to human lives. There is no mystery to explain, just a tragedy to lament. The article thus captures the most important developments in political, social and economic thought of the Japanese eighteenth century through the concept of concurrent rationalities, following the thread of the treatments of the puzzle of the happy villains. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ogyu Sorai's eighteenth-century theory of rituals pushed to an unsettling conclusion the assumption made popular by many contemporary authors that internalization of social norms is better achieved through the subtle control of bodies and gestures than through coercion, threats or argumentation. Because Sorai's rituals aimed at shaping in everyday life, according to pre-determined status, body gestures, utterances, and all the objects surrounding the body, from clothes to houses, furniture and conveyances, they would have transformed life into a performance of a scripted play. They would also have represented the ideal and absolute form of authority, following Hannah Arendt's famous definition of the concept as that which elicits obedience or conformity without need for coercion or argument. The fluidity inherent in the urban life of Tokugawa Japan, however, made sure that Sorai's utopia would remain just that - and probably explains why Arendt found authority so elusive in our modern societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents contributors to the September 1, 2007 issue of the journal "Japanese Studies." They include Timothy Amos, a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Japanese Studies at the National University of Singapore, Olivier Ansart from the University of Sydney who specializes in Tokugawa political and moral philosophy and Celal Bayari, a Nagoya, Japan-based writer who has published about economic, social and business issues in Japan and on Australian-Japan economic relations.

The article offers brief profiles for contributors to the issue including the Professor at the National University of Singapore Timothy Amos, the Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Leeds Kweku Ampiah and the lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Sydney Olivier Ansart.

When the Korean government announced its plan to lift the ban on the circulation of Japanese popular culture in 1998, it immediately articulated its intention to support "genuinely" domestic comic books (called manhwa in Korean) and animation in Korea. This policy move demonstrated the government's ambivalence toward the influence of Japanese manga; at the same time that the government officially encouraged cross-breeding between Japanese and Korean popular cultures and audiences, they became overly protective of Korea's domestic popular culture industry. This paper offers a critical examination of the notion of national culture or national aesthetics by looking at the official policy toward manhwa in Korea. In addition, Lee Dong-Gi's and Hyun Tae-Jun's artworks prove to be important alternatives to the notion of an authentic Korean manhwa culture. Using theories of the hybridizing process by Arjun Appadurai and Nikos Papastergiadis, I also investigate Lee Dong-Gi's Atomaus, a hybrid of Japanese Astro Boy and Disney's Mickey Mouse, as well as Hyun Tae-Jun's 2007 replicas of classic Japanese animation characters. These characters and artworks show the ambiguous state between original and copy, or national and hybrid cultural products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Although respiratory tract infections represent a frequent cause of morbidity in travelers, and pneumonia a frequent cause of medical consultation among febrile travelers returning home, the etiologic spectrum of pneumonia in travelers has not been specifically studied. Methods: We reviewed the medical charts of all travelers hospitalized during a 12-month period in our department with pneumonia after returning home. Results: Seventeen patients (nine men, eight women, mean age 44 years, range 26 to 67 years) were included in this study. The etiology of pneumonia was established in 13 patients. Bacterial pneumonia was documented in 10 cases and was due to Streptococcus pneumoniae (n = 2), Mycoplasma pneumoniae (n = 2), Legionella pneumophila (n = 1), Coxiella burnetti (n = 1), Leptospira sp. (n = 1) or Mycobacterium tuberculosis (n = 3). Other etiologies included histoplasmosis, invasive schistosomiasis and dengue fever (one case each). Conclusion: These results show the wide range of causes of pneumonia among travelers returning from abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]