"This textbook, the first of its kind, is aimed at helping students of Chinese history and culture acquire a great ability at reading Japanese. After an introduction, several charts, and guide to dictionaries, it presents eight chapters--each with a brief introduction, the Japanese text, and an extensive, layered vocabulary list. All chapters are taken from ordinary Japanese resources, but all of the authors are known to be extraordinary scholars. The final appendix provides full translations of all the essays. The principal audience is students who have completed two or three years of classroom Japanese language instruction and want to jump into China-related materials. Although best used in a classroom with a teacher, especially assiduous students may be able to use it on their own."--Provided by publisher.

This study of the writings of Japanese travelers to China from 1862 to 1945 serves both as a window onto changing Japanese images of China and as a vivid account of Sino-Japanese interactions over nearly a century. The year 1862 saw the lifting of the Tokugawa shogunate's ban of over two centuries on overseas contacts, and Japanese travelers were able to resume contact with China, which had begun some fifteen hundred years before. Through the centuries, China had exerted a profound influence on the development of Japanese culture, and what began as a wish to adopt the latest, most developed political and cultural achievements of China - assumed to be the most advanced country on earth -- later became an effort to understand the essence of Japan by defining its difference from China. This book is based upon some five hundred accounts of travel in China by Japanese, only a handful of which have previously been available in Western literature.

Beyond Brushtalk explores interactions between Japanese and Chinese writers during the golden age of such exchange, 1919 to 1937. During this period, there were unprecedented opportunities for exchange between writers, which was made possible by the ease of travel between Japan and China during these years and the educational background of Chinese writers as students in Japan. Although the salubrious interaction that developed during that period was destined not to last, it nevertheless was significant as a courageous essay at cultural interaction. This book will appeal not only to those interested in Sino-Japanese studies, an increasingly important field of study in its own right, but will also appeal to scholars of both Japanese literature and Chinese literature and researchers whose areas of interest correspond to the major writers included in this work such as Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren on the Chinese side and Tanizaki Jun'ichirō and Hayashi Fumiko on the Japanese side. The relations and resulting literary works involving these major writers are often relatively neglected aspects of their total output and will draw interest from scholars of their work. This book will be accessible to both Sinologists and Japanologists with little background in the corresponding field, and to the generalist possessing an interest in literary exchange.

Using close readings of a range of premodern and modern texts, Atsuko Sakaki focuses on the ways in which Japanese writers and readers revised—or in many cases devised—rhetoric to convey "Chineseness" and how this practice contributed to shaping a national Japanese identity. The volume begins by examining how Japanese travelers in China, and Chinese travelers in Japan, are portrayed in early literary works. An increasing awareness of the diversity of Chinese culture forms a premise for the next chapter, which looks at Japan’s objectification of the Chinese and their works of art from the eighteenth century onward. Chapter 3 examines gender as a factor in the formation and transformation of the Sino-Japanese dyad. Sakaki then continues with an investigation of early modern and modern Japanese representations of intellectuals who were marginalized for their insistence on the value of the classical Chinese canon and literary Chinese. The work concludes with an overview of writing in Chinese by early Meiji writers and the presence of Chinese in the work of modern writer Nakamura Shin’ichiro. A final summary of the book’s major themes makes use of several stories by Tanizaki Jun’ichiro.

The significance of Japanese-language scholarship on China cannot be overstated. Yet much of it is largely untapped by China scholars in both the West and China, in part because they are unfamiliar with the Japanese pronunciation of Chinese characters. Even those who know Japanese are frequently frustrated when seeking an obscure reading of a personal or place name. The purpose of this volume is to enable Sinologists and others involved in Chinese studies to access entries in Japanese reference works dealing with China without going through the time-consuming process of looking up characters by radical and stroke. For users of this dictionary, it is a simple matter to find a character by looking it up by its alphabetical pinyin pronunciation. Having located it, the user can go directly to the item in Japanese reference works. The Dictionary includes more than 13,072 entries not only in Chinese characters and their Sino-Japanese (ondoku/onyomi) readings, but also the Japanese (kundoku/kunyomi) readings. The romanized Japanese readings will assist in correctly transcribing Japanese names, such as the names of Japanese publishers and authors, and the technical terms employed by Japanese in their writings on China. These features will also give those familiar with pinyin greater access to material on Japanese history and culture. The ABC Dictionary of Sino-Japanese Readings will be a boon to Sinologists and others interested in the study of China.

This book contains short analyses (kaidai) of Ogyū Sorai’s (1666-1728) most important works, as well as a biography and a number of essays. The essays explore various aspects of his teachings, of the origins of his thought, and of the reception of his ideas in Japan, China, and Korea before and after "modernization" struck in the second half of the nineteenth century. Ogyū Sorai has come to be considered the pivotal thinker in the intellectual history of Early Modern Japan. More research has been done on Sorai than on any other Confucian thinker of this period. This book disentangles the modern reception from the way in which Sorai's ideas were understood and evaluated in Japan and China in the century following his death. The joint conclusion of the research of a number of the foremost specialists in Japan, Taiwan, and the West is that Sorai was and remains an original, innovative, and important thinker, but that his position within East-Asian thought should be redefined in terms of the East-Asian tradition to which he belonged, and not in the paradigms of European History of Philosophy or Intellectual History. The book represents up-to-date scholarship and allows both the young scholar to acquaint himself with Sorai, and the intellectual historian to compare Sorai with other thinkers of other times and of other philosophical traditions.

Naito Konan's periodization of Chinese history is responsible for shaping the twentieth-century Western view of China. Naito was a journalist in the vibrant Meiji press for twenty years, during which he became recognized as Japan's leading Sinologist. He then assumed a chair in China Studies at Kyoto University, where he taught for twenty years, remaining all the while a prolific writer on public affairs. Joshua Fogel's biography treats Naito holistically, pointing up the intricate connections between his Sinological and political interests. As a part of an ongoing tradition based in jitsugaku (concern with the practical applications of knowledge), Naito focused on what he took to be Japan's mission, after its own Meiji reforms, to help China implement comparable reforms. His emphasis on Chinese history and culture as the central influence in East Asia strengthened his Pan-Asian political convictions. Fogel's study offers a penetrating look at a scholar-journalist whose influence is still powerful.