Since the adoption of the 1947 Constitution of Japan, the document has become a contested symbol of contrasting visions of Japan. Japanese Constitutional Revisionism and Civic Activism is a volume which examines the history of Japan's constitutional debates, key legal decisions and interpretations, the history and variety of activism, and activists' ties to party politics and to fellow activists overseas.

This book is an in-depth interpretation of Max Weber as a political theorist of civil society. On the one hand, it reads Weber's ideas from the perspective of modern political thought, rather than the modern social sciences; on the other, it offers a liberal assessment of this complex political thinker without attempting to apologize for his shortcomings. Through an alternative reading of Weber's religious, epistemological and political writings, the book shows Weber's concern with public citizenship in a modern mass democracy and civil society as its cultivating ground. Kim argues Weber's political thought, thus recast, was deeply informed by Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and other German political thinkers and also reveals an affinity to the liberal-republican tradition best represented by Mill and Tocqueville. Kim has effectively resuscitated Weber as a political thinker for our time in which civic virtues and civil society have once again become one of the dominant issues.

In The Politics of Affective Relations, editors Daniel Bell and Hahm Chaihark refine our understanding of the East Asian conception of the self by examining how that conception was formulated, reproduced, and utilized throughout history. Sparked by a strong dissatisfaction with the state over many discourses regarding East Asian politics, this volume moves beyond the simplistic exchange of polemics regarding "Asian Values" and reaches a more nuanced understanding of "relationality." By bringing together a collection of articles authored by experts in a variety of academic disciplines, Bell and Hahm scrutinize how the East Asian emphasis on "relationality" manifests itself in various real-life settings such as the family, the economy, politics, and the legal system. This volume will provide readers with a broader perspective on and a deeper appreciation for the pervasive nature of "relationality" in East Asia.

In The Politics of Affective Relations, editors Daniel Bell and Hahm Chaihark refine our understanding of the East Asian conception of the self by examining how that conception was formulated, reproduced, and utilized throughout history. Sparked by a strong dissatisfaction with the state over many discourses regarding East Asian politics, this volume moves beyond the simplistic exchange of polemics regarding 'Asian Values' and reaches a more nuanced understanding of 'relationality.' By bringing together a collection of articles authored by experts in a variety of academic disciplines, Bell and Hahm scrutinize how the East Asian emphasis on 'relationality' manifests itself in various real-life settings such as the family, the economy, politics, and the legal system. This volume will provide readers with a broader perspective on and a deeper appreciation for the pervasive nature of 'relationality' in East Asia.

What does it mean to say that it is 'We the People' who 'ordain and establish' a constitution? Who are those sovereign people, and how can they do so? Interweaving history and theory, constitutional scholar Chaihark Hahm and political theorist Sung Ho Kim attempt to answer these perennial questions by revisiting the constitutional politics of postwar Japan and Korea. Together, these experiences demonstrate the infeasibility of the conventional assumption that there is a clearly bounded sovereign 'people' prior to constitution-making that stands apart from both outside influence and troubled historical legacies. The authors argue that 'We the People' only emerges through a deeply transformative politics of constitutional founding and, as such, a democratic constitution and its putative author are mutually constitutive. Highly original and genuinely multidisciplinary, this book will be of interest to democratic theorists and scholars of comparative constitutionalism as well as observers of ongoing constitutional debates in Japan and Korea.

This book is an in-depth interpretation of Max Weber as a political theorist of civil society. On the one hand, it reads Weber's ideas from the perspective of modern political thought, rather than the modern social sciences; on the other, it offers a liberal assessment of this complex political thinker without attempting to apologize for his shortcomings. Through an alternative reading of Weber's religious, epistemological and political writings, the book shows Weber's concern with public citizenship in a modern mass democracy and civil society as its cultivating ground. Kim argues Weber's political thought, thus recast, was deeply informed by Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and other German political thinkers and also reveals an affinity to the liberal-republican tradition best represented by Mill and Tocqueville. Kim has effectively resuscitated Weber as a political thinker for our time in which civic virtues and civil society have once again become one of the dominant issues.

Invisible is a book on St. Louis design practice, Axi:Ome led by Heather Woofter and Sung Ho Kim. A collection of essays, built, unbuilt and conceptual projects which maps the trajectory of the last seven years of work from 2015 through 2022. The book covers 24 projects in different cultures and landscapes around the world with various programs and scales. Nader Tehrani, Eric Mumford, Alan Balfour, Jennifer Yoos, Nanako Umemoto, and Jessie Reiser provide insightful texts supporting and articulating critical frameworks of Axi:Ome, while defining a discourse of complexities in contemporary practice that is emerging from academic expectations. The book documents the invisible ethos that constructs a project in an intricate world that challenges practitioners to re-think and re-examine how they position into architectural spectrum. Invisible cartographs and chronicles the legitimisation of architectural practice that engages the pedagogical visions of the profession and the education.

The goal of object recognition is to label objects from images and to estimate the poses of the labeled objects. The field of object recognition has seen tremendous progress with successful applications in some specific domains such as face recognition. However, the current state-of-the-art methods show unsatisfactory results for more general object domains in complex natural environments with visual ambiguities. In this dissertation, we aim to enhance the object identification and categorization with the guide of visual context and graphical model. In this work, we propose a general framework for the cooperative object identification and object categorization. Examplars used in identification provide useful information of similarity in categorization. Conversely, novel objects are rejected in identification but the proposed object categorization can label the novel objects and segment them out for database update in identification. This work can be helpful to the engineers in artificial intelligence and machine vision.