First published in 2007, The Nanking Atrocity remains an essential resource for understanding the massacre committed by Japanese soldiers in Nanking, China during the winter of 1937-38. Through a series of deeply considered and empirically rigorous essays, it provides a far more complex and nuanced perspective than that found in works like Iris Chang's bestselling The Rape of Nanking. It systematically reveals the flaws and exaggerations in Chang's book while deflating the self-exculpatory narratives that persist in Japan even today. This second edition includes an extensive new introduction by the editor reflecting on the historiographical developments of the last decade, in advance of the 80th anniversary of the massacre.

First published in 2007, The Nanking Atrocity remains an essential resource for understanding the massacre committed by Japanese soldiers in Nanking, China during the winter of 1937-38. Through a series of deeply considered and empirically rigorous essays, it provides a far more complex and nuanced perspective than that found in works like Iris Chang's bestselling The Rape of Nanking. It systematically reveals the flaws and exaggerations in Chang's book while deflating the self-exculpatory narratives that persist in Japan even today. This second edition includes an extensive new introduction by the editor reflecting on the historiographical developments of the last decade, in advance of the 80th anniversary of the massacre.

Opium is more than just a drug extracted from poppies. Over the past two centuries it has been a palliative medicine, an addictive substance, a high-value commodity, a powerful mechanism for concentrating and transferring wealth and power between nations, and the anchor of a now vanished sociocultural world in and around China. Opium Regimes integrates the pioneering research of sixteen scholars to show that the opium trade was not purely a British operation but involved Chinese merchants, Chinese state agents, and Japanese imperialists as well. The book presents a coherent historical arc that moves from British imperialism in the nineteenth century to Chinese capital formation and state making at the turn of the century to Japanese imperialism through the 1930s and 1940s and finally to the apparent resolution of China's opium problem in the early 1950s.

Avoiding the Eurocentric focus of earlier approaches, this volume relies on the concept of "opium regimes" in Asia -- the regional and local systems that states, corporations, and civic associations set up either to profit from or suppress the opium trade. By focusing on these opium regimes, the authors are able to investigate the systematic and comprehensive character of drug-control structures, stressing their capacity for operating in the political realm. The complex interweaving of commodity trading, addiction, and state intervention in opium's history refigured the historical face of East Asia more profoundly than any other commodity.

This study analyzes "New Theses (Shinron)," by Aizawa Seishisai (1781 1863), and its contribution to Japanese political thought and policy during the early modern era. "New Theses" is found to be indispensable to our understanding of Japan's transformation from a feudal to a modern state.

Focusing on Aizawa, Wakabayashi traces the development of xenophobia during the Tokugawa period and examines the basis of anti Western sentiment. He shows how knowledge of Christianity inspired Aizawa to develop the potent concept of kokutai ( what is essential to a nation ). His analysis explains why the Edobakufu's policies of national isolation (sakoku) and armed expulsion of Westerners (joi) gained widespread support in the late Tokugawa. Wakabayashi also describes how information on Western affairs and world conditions decisively altered Tokugawa Confucian conceptions of civilization and barbarism, and how this in turn enabled the Japanese to redefine their nation's relationship to China and the West.

Rather than place Aizawa and his "New Theses" of 1825 at the beginning of a process leading up to the Meiji Restoration, Wakabayashi discusses "New Theses" in conjunction with the bakufu's Expulsion Edict issued in the same year. He concludes that the convergence of the two events in 1825 marks the emergence of modern nationalism in Japan, and therefore should perhaps be seen as more epoch making than the 1868 Restoration itself.

The study also presents a complete translation of "New Theses."