colonial japan

Hardcover. Lewisburg ME, Bucknell University Press , 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 321 pages, black cloth covers with gilt lettering on the spine. Bright, unclipped dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY THE TRANSLATOR, DANIEL SHAPIRO on the title page. Bilingual edition. Chilean poet Tomas Harris's Cipango - written in the 1980s, first published in 1992, and considered by many to be the author's best work to date - employs the metaphor of a journey. The poems collectively allude to the voyage of Columbus, who believed that he'd reached the Far East ("Cipango," or Japan), not the Americas. Building on that mistaken historical premise, Cipango comments on the oppressive legacy of colonialism in Latin America - manifested in twentieth-century Chile through the 1973 military coup by Augusto Pinochet and the brutal dictatorship there - and on the violence and degradation of contemporary urban society. The author's vision is of a decadent, apocalyptic world that nonetheless contains the possibility for regeneration. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 388 pages, hardcover. B&w plates. INSCRIBED BY ECKERT. Light foxing to edge and light wear to bottom edges of cover. According to conventional interpretations, the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910 destroyed a budding native capitalist economy on the peninsula and blocked the development of a Korean capitalist class until 1945. In this expansive and provocative study, now available in paperback, Carter J. Eckert challenges the standard view and argues that Japanese imperialism, while politically oppressive, was also the catalyst and cradle of modern Korean industrial development. Ancient ties to China were replaced by new ones to Japan - ties that have continued to shape the South Korean political economy down to the present day.Eckert explores a wide range of themes, including the roots of capitalist development in Korea, the origins of the modern business elite, the nature of Japanese colonial policy and the Japanese colonial state, the relationship between the colonial government and the Korean economic elite, and the nature of Korean collaboration. He conveys a clear sense of the human complexity, archival richness, and intellectual challenge of the historical period. His documentation is thorough; his arguments are compelling and often strikingly innovative.