The book outlines a dramatic history of the failed liberalization of Japanese private law during the Meiji era. Once Japan overthrew the shogunate and fully opened up to contact with the world, modernization of the backward country and its fragmented customary legal system became a crucial objective of the new ruling elites. The initiated codification of law included the drafting of the first Civil Code, designed to revolutionize the traditional societal ties in Japan. The legal project, seem...

'Bodies beyond Binaries' advances the historiographical debate around the body in colonial and postcolonial Asia. Opening new research avenues that go beyond the binaries that have sometimes permeated previous scholarly contributions, this book explores not just the direct colonial encounter, but also wider global interconnections and flows involved in the making of knowledge, cultural constructions, and ‘techniques’ of the body.

Throughout the volume, critical concepts such as gender, s...

In 1860, seventeen-year-old samurai Tateishi Onojirō, nicknamed “Tommy,” made headlines across America for his real and imagined adventures as part of the 1860 Japanese Embassy, the first Japanese diplomatic mission to the United States. The perception of Tateishi’s interracial romantic encounters with American women opened up to controversy and questioning the hierarchies of race and culture fundamental to many antebellum American concepts of civilization. This book reveals how Tateis...

This edited volume reflects the latest research on Rapa Nui and the Pacific in the fields of archaeology, education, history, Indigenous studies and museology. Archaeologists show the relationship between value judgments, archaeological data and mapping; economic, ideological and socio-political interactions and stone quarrying; rock art and voyaging histories and Rapa Nui astronomy. The book pays attention to European views including those of the explorer Jacob Roggeveen, the expedition lead...

This 43th volume of the ASLU series presents a useful GIS procedure to study settlement patterns in landscape archaeology. In several Mediterranean regions archaeological sites have been mapped by fieldwalking surveys, producing large amounts of data. These legacy site-based survey data represent an important resource to study ancient settlement organization. Methodological procedures are necessary to cope with the limits of these data, and more importantly with the distortions on data patter...

The Russia-Ukraine war is a multifaceted beast. It ranges from fighting on the ground to high diplomacy, from domestic anti-war protests to international weapon supplies, from justification through sham referenda to coercion via economic sabotage, and from operational misdirection to covering up war crimes. There are close connections between these facets: the collapse of a front leads to the discovery of mass graves; the delivery of weapon systems depends on Zelensky’s appeal to the intern...