With the spread of manga (Japanese comics) and anime (Japanese cartoons) around the world, many have adopted the Japanese term 'otaku' to identify fans of such media. The connection to manga and anime may seem straightforward, but, when taken for granted, often serves to obscure the debates within and around media fandom in Japan since the term 'otaku' appeared in the niche publication Manga Burikko in 1983. Debating Otaku in Contemporary Japan disrupts the naturalization and trivialization of 'otaku' by examining the historical contingency of the term as a way to identify and contain problematic youth, consumers and fan cultures in Japan. Its chapters, many translated from Japanese and available in English for the first time - and with a foreword by Otsuka Eiji, former editor of Manga Burikko - explore key moments in the evolving discourse of 'otaku' in Japan. Rather than presenting a smooth, triumphant narrative of the transition of a subculture to the mainstream, the edited volume repositions 'otaku' in specific historical, social and economic contexts, providing new insights into the significance of the 'otaku' phenomenon in Japan and the world. By going back to original Japanese documents, translating key contributions by Japanese scholars and offering sustained analysis of these documents and scholars, Debating Otaku in Contemporary Japan provides alternative histories of and approaches to 'otaku'. For all students and scholars of contemporary Japan and the history of Japanese fan and consumer cultures, this volume will be a foundation for understanding how 'otaku', at different places and times and to different people, is meaningful.

Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan offers a fresh perspective on gender politics by focusing on the Japanese housewife of the 1950s as a controversial representation of democracy, leisure, and domesticity. Examining the shifting personae of the housewife, especially in the appealing texts of women's magazines, reveals the diverse possibilities of postwar democracy as they were embedded in media directed toward Japanese women. Each chapter explores the contours of a single controversy, including debate over the royal wedding in 1959, the victory of Japan's first Miss Universe, and the unruly desires of postwar women. Jan Bardsley also takes a comparative look at the ways in which the Japanese housewife is measured against equally stereotyped notions of the modern housewife in the United States, asking how both function as narratives of Japan-U.S. relations and gender/class containment during the early Cold War.

The year 1543 marked the beginning of a new global consciousness in Japan with the arrival of shipwrecked Portuguese merchants on Tanegashima Island in Southern Japan. Other Portuguese rapidly followed and Japan became aware of a world beyond India. The Portuguese brought with them the musket, which was quickly copied and began to change Japanese warfare and influence their unification process. After the merchants had opened the way, the first missionary, Francis Xavier, arrived in 1549 and the Christian century began. The arrival of the Portuguese was recorded in the "Tanegashima Kafu", the "Teppoki" and the "Kunitomo Teppoki", which are here translated and presented together with European reports. Special attention is given to the role of Tanegashima Island and Mendes Pinto, who wrote his famous picaresque account of Japan, the "Peregrinacam".

It has been the home to priests and prostitutes, poets and spies. It has been the stage for an improbable flirtation between an Israeli girl and a Palestinian boy living on opposite sides of the barbed wire that separated enemy nations. It has even been the scene of an unsolved international murder. This one-time shepherd's path between Jerusalem and Bethlehem has been a dividing line for decades. Arab families called it "al Mantiqa Haram." Jewish residents knew it as "shetach hefker." In both languages it meant the same thing: "the Forbidden Area." Peacekeepers that monitored the steep fault line dubbed it "Barbed Wire Alley." To folks on either side of the border, it was the same thing: A dangerous no-man's land separating warring nations and feuding cultures. The barbed wire came down in 1967. But it was soon supplanted by evermore formidable cultural, emotional and political barriers separating Arab and Jew. For nearly two decades, coils of barbed wire ran right down the middle of what became Assael Street, marking the fissure between Israeli-controlled West Jerusalem and Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem. In a beautiful narrative, A Street Divided offers a more intimate look at one road at the heart of the conflict, where inches really do matter.

At midnight on 30 June 1997, Hong Kong reverted to Chinese sovereignty after 150 years of British rule. The moment when the British flag came down was dramatic enough but the ten years leading up to it were full of surprising incident and change. These 'Letters from Hong Kong', written by an Englishwoman who was involved in those events from 1987, are both an unusual historical record and a heartwarming account of women's domestic, intellectual and political activity. This epilogue brings Hong Kong up to date ten years after the Handover.

The Lebanese civil war, which spanned the years of 1975 to 1990,caused the migration of hundreds of thousands of Lebanese citizens, many of whom are still writing of their experiences. Jumana Bayeh presents an important and major study of the literature of the Lebanese diaspora. Focusing on novels and writings produced in the aftermath of Lebanon's protracted civil war, Bayeh explores the complex relationships between place, displacement and belonging, and illuminates the ways in which these writings have shaped a global Lebanese identity. Combining history with sociology, Bayeh examines how the literature borne out of this expatriate community reflects a Lebanese diasporic imaginary that is sensitive to the entangled associations of place and identity. Paving the way for new approaches to understanding diasporic literature and identity, this book will be vital for researchers of migration studies and Middle Eastern literature, as well as those interested in the cultures, history and politics of the Middle East.

The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions is the most comprehensive treatment of the subject to date. In scope, the book encompasses the genesis of the Arabic novel in the second half of the nineteenth century and its development to the present in every Arabic-speaking country and in Arab immigrant destinations on six continents. Editor Wail S. Hassan and his contributors describe a novelistic phenomenon which has pre-modern roots, stretching centuries back within the Arabic cultural tradition, and branching outward geographically and linguistically to every Arab country and to Arab writing in many languages around the world. The first of three innovative dimensions of this Handbook consists of examining the ways in which the Arabic novel emerged out of a syncretic merger between Arabic and European forms and techniques, rather than being a simple importation of the latter and rejection of the former, as early critics of the Arabic novel claimed. The second involves mapping the novel geographically as it took root in every Arab country, developing into often distinct though overlapping and interconnected local traditions. Finally, the Handbook concerns the multilingual character of the novel in the Arab world and by Arab immigrants and their descendants around the world, both in Arabic and in at least a dozen other languages. The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions reflects the current status of research in the broad field of Arab novelistic traditions and signals toward new directions of inquiry.

The collection contains materials of archival documents and memoirs concerning the famine of 1931-1933 in Central Kazakhstan. Various documents from the archives reveal to the reader the most difficult period of the Soviet history of Kazakhstan, associated with the dispossession of the kulaks and debaiization of the Kazakh village and aul, Stalinist forced collectivization, forced sedentarization of nomadic Kazakh farms, large-scale cattle, meat and grain procurements, famine and epidemics in the republic. The publication introduces previously unpublished archival materials from the Central and regional archives of Kazakhstan into scientific circulation. In addition, the collection includes the memories of famine witnesses preserved by their descendants. The collection is addressed to researchers, students, as well as a wide range of readers interested in the history of Kazakhstan.

In the Medieval Ages, there existed an oral tradition that already circulated in the British Isles and Scandinavia before the Christian era. It was the origin of the Arthurian legends as the latter was re-written in the 12th century. Many parchments existed after it was put in writing but they were destroyed by Christian missionaries between the 6th and 8th centuries AD. One that belonged to people who journeyed to Iceland was rediscovered in 1643. It is called "Codex Regius" and scholars have named it the "Elder Edda," to distinguish it from Snorri Sturluson's prose Edda. L. A. Waddell theorised that the sibyls who recited this tradition in the Medieval Ages had forgotten that the stories of this tradition were about the creation of civilization in Cappadocia, and had originated from the land that is now suspected to have been the cradle of the Sumerian civilization and the "Garden of Eden" of Genesis, as it is where the oldest temple in the world (that is presently excavated at Gobekli Tepe, near Urfa in Turkey) has been discovered. Waddell contended that the fort at Boghazkoy (Hattusha) had been built by Aryan architects of the first civilization who eradicated a Serpent-Dragon cult in this region c. 3,000 BC, and that King Arthur (who, on the basis of the Arthurian legends, is associated with idealist concepts of civilization) was the Her-Thor of the Codex and Scandinavian mythology. The tradition could have been brought to Europe by Phoenicians in 2,400 BC or Trojan Greeks of Hittite origin in 1,000 BC on the basis of Geoffrey of Monmouth records about the kings of Britain. Chapter 5 of Waddell's biography discusses his discovery of geographical place-names in the Codex. They support the view that the Scenes of the Edda are about events taking place in Cappadocia. ...Lieut.-Col. Laurence Austine Waddell (1854-1938) was a British Army officer with an established reputation mainly due to a work on the 'Buddhism' of Tibet, his explorations of the Himalayas, and a biography which included records of the 1903-4 military expedition to Lhasa (Lhasa and its Mysteries). Waddell was also in the limelight due to his acquisition of Tibetan manuscripts which he donated to the British Museum. His overriding interest was in 'Aryan origins'. After learning Sanskrit and Tibetan, and in between military expeditions together with Col. Younghusband, and gathering intelligence from the borders of Tibet in the Great Game, Waddell researched Lamaism. He extended his activities to Archaeology, Philology and Ethnology, and was credited with discoveries in relation to Buddha. His personal ambition was to locate records of ancient civilization in Tibetan lamaseries. ... Waddell is little known as an archaeologist and scholar, in contrast with his fame in the Oriental field, due to the controversial nature of his published works dealing with 'Aryan themes'. Waddell studied Sumerian and presented evidence that an Aryan migration flee- ing Sargon II carried Sumerian records to India. He interrupted his comparative studies of Sumerian and Indian king-lists to publish a work on Phoenician origins and decipherment of Indus Valley seals, the inscriptions of which he claimed were similar to Sumerian pictogram signs cited from G. A. Barton's plates, which are reproduced in this volume. ... Waddell's life is reconstructed from primary sources, such as letters from Marc Aurel Stein at the British Museum and Theophilus G. Pinches, held in the Special Collections at the University of Glasgow Library. Special attention is paid to the contemporary reception of his theories, with the objective of re-evaluating his contribution; they are contrasted to past and present academic views, in addition to an overview of relevant discoveries in Archaeology.