An exciting explosion of urban expansion is occurring in East Asia: cities such as Singapore, Taipei, Seoul, Tokyo, Beijing, and Shanghai are expanding at a prodigious rate and bringing widespread change to the region. Peter G. Rowe's East Asia Modern is a timely comparative analysis of urban growth in this rapidly evolving part of the globe. A renowned scholar on East Asian architecture and urbanism, Peter G. Rowe examines how the unique modernizing process of East Asian cities can be most usefully understood. Rowe offers a historical assessment of the region, chronicling the cities' development over the last century and setting into context their individual paths toward becoming modern. Rowe explains what the modernizing process has meant for the cultural diffusion of predominantly Western ideas, how East Asian urban regions have developed a distinct type of modernity, and what lessons can be gleaned from the contemporary East Asian experience. Refuting many common misconceptions about contemporary East Asian life, East Asia Modern offers a readable critical assessment of life in modern East Asia while also pointing to possibilities for the future.

The East Asian Modern Girl reports the long-neglected experiences of modern women in East Asia during the interwar period. The edited volume includes original studies on the modern girl in Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, Japan, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, which reveal differentiated forms of colonial modernity, influences of global media and the struggles of women at the time. The advent of the East Asian modern girl is particularly meaningful for it signifies a separation from traditional Confucian influences and progression toward global media and capitalism, which involves high political and economic tension between the East and West. This book presents geo-historical investigations on the multi-force triggered phenomenon and how it eventually contributed to greater post-war transformations.

Peter Rowe and Yun Fu’s second volume on the modernization of architecture in the Far East deals with Southeast Asia and Austronesia, including the 12 nation states of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, East Timor, Philippines and Taiwan, as well as the ocean peoples of Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia. The modern architecture of these culturally and nationally heterogenous regions echoes local vernacular traditions and colonial as well as postcolonial hegemonies from both the East and the West. The book tells the stories of these separate roots and their culmination into contemporary architectural production, analyzing the distinctiveness and quality of approx. 65 building projects that have emerged in the past half century.

How does one comprehend the phenomenon of the modernization of an Asian society in a globalized East Asian context? With this opening question, the author proceeds to give an account of how the modernization processes for postcolonial societies in Asia, such as those of India, Malaysia, and Singapore, are fraught with collaborations and conflicts between different socio-political, historical, economic, and cultural agents. Such ambivalent dynamics contribute to what Wee argues as a 'revealing distortion' of the extant models of Western modernity, which is nonetheless rooted in the politics of worldwide capitalism. Wee's narrative refuses to accept the uncritical interpretation of the modernizing processes in Asia as liberation from the hegemony of Euro-American capitalism. But neither is Wee prepared to concede that all cultural initiatives in the postcolonial societies are, therefore, denied all power to devise alternative forms of expression in the face of this haunting presence. It is the persistent effort to see the many faces of modernization in Asia in their full complexity that sets this study apart. Readers will discover that what seems to be the modernization of a single geopolitical entity is inevitably linked to the dynamics of various agents in other locations at different times, which makes us reflect on the existence of the many 'distortions' in our societies.

"A scholarly, concise, and eminently readable history of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Southeast Asian civilization since the 19th century."--Dust jacket.

For decades, historians and societal forces have campaigned for rapprochement, reconciliation and dialogue between East Asian nations. This book is a result of these efforts. Debates regarding the interpretation of the modern history of East Asia continue to affect bilateral relations between the states of the region. History education has become a particularly controversial issue in this context. This book’s main message is that a common understanding regarding the history of East Asia is possible, even though some differences remain. It is not only a major contribution to reconciliation in the region, but as the first textbook on the history of East Asia written collaboratively by scholars from three East Asian countries, it is also highly recommended for use in an anglophone teaching environment. The authors are a group of historians, teachers and concerned citizens from China, Japan and South Korea.

The contributors analyse the subject of Asian pop culture arranged under three headings: 'Television Industry in East Asia', 'Transnational-Crosscultural Receptions of TV Dramas' and 'Nationalistic reactions'.