This dissertation, Anxious Consumption: The Fantastic, Affect, and Transnational Cultural Flows in 1970s-1990s Japan, traces an alternate genealogy of consumption in 1970s-1990s Japan through reading the fantastic in literary and media texts. My use of the term “fantastic” broadly conceives of the category beyond its common limitation to the supernatural and otherworldly, to indicating a form of pervasive structural anxiety behind consumer culture’s celebratory façade of material prosperity and images of economic “progress." Rather than a specific subject position of any particular individual or group, I approach the fantastic as a liminal affective force that is fluid and constantly in-motion, capable of enveloping, implicating, and bypassing various bodies it comes across, while holding the power to disrupt ideological borders, the confines of static forms of identities, and categories such as gender, race, class, and nationality. Emerging at a historical moment characterized as a de-politicized plunge into self-indulgent celebrations of consumerism, the fantastic complicates this narrative through its power to unveil the workings of otherwise seamless immaterial forces of control within a consumerist landscape. Through its power to reveal and de-familiarize what has been naturalized, the fantastic surfaces as an indication of unease—from expressing unspoken anxiety experienced on the affective register, to revealing nationalistic agendas of the nation state. In the texts that I examine, the fantastic is represented by expressions of anxiety manifesting as the abject, Otherness, and the monstrous feminine— liminal figures that, I argue, reveal the psychological structure underlying cultural production in 1970s-1990s Japan. Through reading across various media forms—fiction, literary- nonfiction texts, newspaper reportage, manga, magazines, and protest leaflets—I trace fantastic’s mobilizing force in de-stabilizing dominant and homogenizing frameworks through which consumption in postwar Japan has been narrated. Chapters one and two focus on the affective dimensions of consumption. These chapters look at the on-going negotiation between biopolitical capture and liberatory potentials within consumer culture in an urban landscape. Chapters three and four look at the material dimensions of consumption, focusing on the mapping of consumption onto iterations of space and notions of mobility—across boundaries of nation, race, and species. These chapters examine how marginalized bodies excluded from national visions of prosperity and development make visible limitations of nation states, or human-centric modes of sensing.

This dissertation examines the trajectory of Japan's aviation from its birth in 1910 until 1937, when, on the eve of war with China, Japanese military aviation matched and in many aspects even surpassed that of the West. In particular this study, which draws predominantly on archival material from Japan and Germany, seeks to demonstrate that German influence on Japan's aviation became dominant by the mid-1920s and continued for a decade. German assistance prepared Japanese engineers for the important transition from imitation to independent design. It also profoundly reshaped the Japanese military's air fleet and air strategy.

The 1919 Versailles Treaty drew the attention of the Japanese to the high standard of German aviation technology when it granted the Japanese free access to German factories and military facilities. These visits, together with the arrival of German war trophy aircraft in Japan, prompted the Japanese to purchase German airplanes and production licenses and to invite German engineers to Japan to educate a new generation of Japanese aircraft designers.

German aircraft manufacturers became instrumental in the rise of the Imperial Japanese Navy's air power. German hardware and know-how laid the foundation for the design and production of flying boats and carrier airplanes. These state-of the-art aircraft substantially enhanced the navy's strike force and emboldened its air strategists to embrace a technology-driven hawkishness.

With the help of German aviation specialists the Imperial Japanese Army also modernized its air squadrons. During the 1931 invasion of Manchuria the army deployed some of the world's most advanced military aircraft. Yet, the successes of these airplanes made the army's planners complacent. They drifted into a doctrinal slumber that paid little attention to the further development of an advanced air strategy.

Shifting the focus from aircraft design toward aircraft production, the dissertation also addresses the limits of German influence. The Japanese were aware of the advances in Germany's production technology. However, the military's emphasis on aircraft with ever higher performance and the industry's continuing reliance on small subcontractors took a heavy toll on productivity. An industry that built world-class fighters and bombers was ill-prepared to produce them efficiently in large numbers.

This dissertation analyzes the role of sound in language use in early Chinese texts. By focusing on developments of sound-based recurrences such as rhyme and paronomasia, focusing on the classical, foundational texts from the third to first centuries BCE, I offer a new understanding of how textuality, the writing system, and language itself were conceptualized during these centuries. Overall, I argue that these sound-based devices underwent transformative functional and structural changes, in which their primary focus shifted from composition to interpretation. I trace the importance of sound in language use from the Later Mohist textual material through other Warring States texts, including the “Masters’ literature” (zǐ shū 子書), all the way to Hàn dynasty material. Specifically, this dissertation highlights that sound recurrences in early Chinese texts occur both as a structuring element for longer material – whereby sound coordinates textual units – and as a means to express conceptual and ontological connections valid for ancient language users. Additionally, this dissertation proposes to computationally apply existing historical phonological data at scale to digitized early Chinese textual material in order to detect phonological recurrences. Key findings of this study include, firstly, that early Chinese rhymes and paronomasia did not only fulfill ornamental and mnemonic functions but could also form the basis for performative segments, arguments, and ontological connections postulated by and in texts. Secondly, functions of paronomasia shift over centuries, changing from compositional devices to decidedly interpretive tools.

Manchukuo was a state that was established by the Japanese military in Manchuria (Northeast China) in 1932 and collapsed in 1945 with the defeat of Japan. Immediately after its founding, the Japanese Kwantung Army, later joined by the Manchukuo Army, initiated a series of "bandit suppression"(tōbatsu; 討伐) campaigns to consolidate the new regime. This dissertation will focus on "bandit suppression" in Manchukuo as a means of illuminating the state's claims to legitimacy, its ability to mobilize at different levels, and the involvement of "bandit suppression" in other dimensions of state building. By examining how "bandit suppression" was perceived, represented, and practiced in the context of Manchukuo's state building, I will argue that the perception of the "bandit problem" and the practice of suppression campaigns in Manchukuo embodied the state's pursuit of legitimacy. Furthermore, the ideological, administrative, and legal construction of the state, as well the widespread mobilization of different groups of people in the "anti-bandit" campaigns also facilitated the state building process of Manchukuo.

Through the lens of "bandit suppression," I will suggest that the crucial concern of the state was to obtain legitimacy as the foundation of governmental power. Confronted with domestic disorder and the influence of Chinese nationalism, for Manchukuo itself to gain recognition and legitimacy for its continued existence as a state, it had to create a consciousness of its right to govern and the recognition by the governed of that right. Besides, to obtain legitimacy and consolidate state authority also involved "the capacity of a political system to engender and maintain the belief that existing political institutions are the most appropriate and proper ones for the society." Therefore, the campaigns against "bandits" were often accompanied by the proclamation of the founding ideas of Manchukuo, including the principles of the "Kingly Way" (ōdō; 王道), "ethnic harmony," and bringing peace and order to the people. In this sense, "bandit suppression" embodied "a state historiographic discourse about order, ordering, justice, and freedom."

This dissertation addresses intricate intersections among the affective body, global modernity, and literary history in Japanese literature in the early twentieth century, that is, the imperial eras of late Meiji (1868-1912) and Taisho (1912-1926). Uno Koji (1891-1961) and his best-known novella Kura no naka (1919) afford the gravitation that draws together such disparate topics as hysteria, melancholia, ownership and debt, collecting, and biography into mutually generative constellations. As Uno's ambivalent position within canonical literary history forms a fertile relation with the stylistic experimentalism of the text, the pair presents felicitous events across the epistemological boundary between life and writing, and bodily and literary style. Geared towards properly expanding the horizon of inquiry, this study emphatically pursues the reverberations between Uno and Kura no naka and such varied contemporaries as Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Walter Benjamin, Charlie Chaplin, Natsume Soseki, and Virginia Woolf; and thereby illuminates the ineluctably global milieu that was modernity in the early twentieth century. The discussion closely engages with theoretical writings, drawing most extensively on psychoanalytic approaches in order to account for some of the most intractable questions that have tested the disciplinary limits of modern Japanese literature. Chapter 1 explores hysteria as a fresh conceptual passage for feminist criticism, a provocation to the current preoccupation with ideological investigation which uniformly effaces the body as a differential event. Chapter 2 is a metonymic experiment deriving theoretical prompts from the larger discussion on hysteria in order to vitalize the increasingly expiring notion of shishosetsu in light of postcolonial melancholia. While Chapter 3 magnifies an intimate scene of the two visual subjects transpiring on the precipice of hysteria, Chapter 4 traces the kinetic body within particular narrative-spatial coordinates. Both chapters impel towards the question of the relation to the other, and the world, by way of the narrative. Finally, Chapter 5 attempts to reimagine bio-graphy--differentiated from biography--as a form of literary history new precisely for its being a writing of the body. Overall, the human and objectal figures arising from the study are a call of love attuned by several related mimetic modalities: distance to the intimate other, remembering the mother, and becoming the (m)other.

This study consists of the cultural and intellectual interactions between literary elites in China and Korea that took place from the late nineteenth century to 1945. Although most of the relevant historiography of modern Korea emphasizes the influence of Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945) on Korea’s modern historical path, I examine the ways that the post-nineteenth-century cultural and intellectual interactions between the literary elites in China and Korea contributed to the rise of modern Korea. In particular, I focus on Korean literary elites in China—envoys, educators, and exiles—to account for the ways that their engagement with Chinese officials and intellectuals stimulated the swift metamorphosis of Korea that began in the 1860s and continued until the end of Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945).

The first two chapters of the dissertation investigate early Sino-Korean relations before the arrival of Western influences, examining these relations through exchange envoys and the modern print culture in Shanghai, which strongly influenced Korea in the late nineteenth century. These chapters comprise the first part of the dissertation that focuses on Korea’s encounter with the modern world through China. I show how the perceptions of Korean intellectuals in China contributed directly to the change in Korea’s attitude toward the West, and indeed the world, pushing perspectives far beyond the traditional tributary system toward embracing a broader intellectual curiosity and pursuit. Following this, the next two chapters explore the interactions between Chinese and Korean intellectuals in Shanghai during the Japanese colonial period. Each chapter focuses on influential Korean nationalist thinkers and their activities to legitimize Korea’s anticolonial struggle through a Sino-Korean nationalist dialogue and the political impact of Sino-Korean nationalism in East Asia in the twentieth century.

 Sino-Korean relations in the early twentieth century illustrate the essential transnational role of intellectual ideas relating to reform, national history, and nationalist thought in shaping cultures and countries. In the conclusion, I suggest how such a historical argument can support the construction of a regional history of East Asia as an approach for examining the political tension in East Asia that has been caused by historical disputes. This study of sinographic dialogues within the East Asia region contributes in developing a nuanced understanding of regional interaction and its dynamic in East Asia.

The Song Dynasty (960-1276) witnessed significant transitions in Pure Land Buddhism, with the rising literati class playing a crucial role in reshaping this religious tradition. This dissertation contextualizes these changes within the Buddhist resurgence following the Huichang Persecution (841-845) and the political turmoil of the tenth century. By examining the transformation of Pure Land belief and its interaction with literati culture from four perspectives—social organization, cultural paradigm, print technology, and anthologization practice—this project sheds light on the complex dynamics that shaped the development of Pure Land Buddhism during this period.The dissertation investigates the popularization of Pure Land teachings through the lens of community organization, focusing on the West Lake Lotus Society established by the monk Shengchang in the late tenth century. It also explores how Song literati constructed and adapted the myth of Huiyuan and his “White Lotus Society” to make Pure Land teachings culturally appealing and socially acceptable among their social stratum. The study further analyzes the significant role of lay Buddhists, particularly Wang Gu and Wang Rixiu, in composing and circulating proselytizing texts that simplified and restructured Pure Land doctrines for a broader audience. Finally, it examines the first anthology of Pure Land texts, the Lebang wenlei (Categories of Writings on the Blissful Land 樂邦文類), compiled by the Tiantai monk Zongxiao 宗曉 (1151-1214) in 1199 CE, highlighting his pioneering efforts to establish Pure Land Buddhism as a distinct and legitimate tradition, with literary footprint deserving of a comprehensive anthology. Employing a combination of social network analysis, textual analysis, and literary-historical analysis, this dissertation offers new insights into the popularization of Buddhism, religious shifts within the Tang-Song transition framework, and religious-literary writings of Song literati. By analyzing the reciprocal influence between literati culture and the Pure Land tradition, this dissertation seeks to complicate current academic narratives and offer a more complex and multifaceted understanding of the interaction between religion and literati culture.

This dissertation bridges the gap of modern Chinese history divided by the Taiping wars. The first three chapters cover the consolidation of commercial taxes and charitable organizations by the central state, which culminated in the reinvention of the lijin merchant funds for public finance in the 1850s. The middle chapter on upper-gentry activism during the Taiping wars details how elites altered national policies in diplomacy as well as military deployment. From Shanghai, upper-gentry elites persuaded the central state to request foreign powers to intervene in the Chinese civil war. Elites also lured the Hunan army commanded by Li Hongzhang to Shanghai with lijin revenue. The final two chapters document how upper-gentry elites drew from both recent experiences and long-established practices to achieve the gentrification of lijin by perpetuating war-time contingencies for the long-term successes of their families. By formalizing lijin as a replacement of land tax in the post-war reconstruction period, upper-gentry elites shifted the fiscal burden from landowners to everyday consumers.At the core of this dissertation is a prosopography on a group of upper-gentry elites associated with Suzhou. Having earned the official status with exam degrees and/or office purchase, their experience as refugees in Shanghai during the Taiping wars enabled new plans for the future: some left officialdom and became indulged in collecting art; some continued to work for the public sector and benefited from social networks forged during the war; some built new business empires and expanded them to charitable organizations; some got lost in the economic downturn after the war and had to live on borrowing. By joining individual experiences with long-term structural changes, this study revises prevalent conclusions on post-Taiping China as either in devolution or restoration. Challenges from the Taiping rebels and foreign imperialists in the new era were simultaneously opportunities for the elites and the state to bound more firmly. This trusting and interdependent relationship between the emperor and his ministers in and out of office, I argue, is the crucial condition to understand Qing history, which also hints why everything seemed different in the twentieth century.

One of the major philosophical problems in Early China was the relationship between the person and the world, and in particular, how to act in relation to the world. This dissertation addresses the problem of agency in Early China, and pursues three main guiding questions: how to act efficaciously in different situations, how to cope with uncertainty and unpredictability in ordinary life, and how to achieve control and freedom.

I offer a critical and systematic analysis of an extraordinary model of successful action that I call “adaptive agency” or “adaptation” (yin 因). As opposed to other models of action attested in early texts, such as the prescriptive and the forceful, the adaptive agent necessitates great capacity of situational awareness, reflection, flexibility, and creativity in order to produce responses ad hoc: strategies of action designed for specific, non-permanent, and non-generalizable life problems. This model for choosing an action as an adjusted response to a specific situation guarantees the agent a higher success rate in his actions, let these be in political, military, professional, medical, religious, ethical or ordinary life contexts.

This dissertation is both born from a new methodological orientation and a contribution toward establishing it, by means of exemplifying how we can build meaningful critical theories in Early Chinese philosophy and intellectual history without using the obsolete hermeneutical categories of school of thought, book and author. I trace tensions and similarities in the Early Chinese approach to the problem of agency cross-textually, using a large range of textual materials and research methods. The philosophical proposal of adaptive agency is particularly suitable to this kind of methodological project, for it consistently appears across a wide variety of texts, authors, and intellectual orientations throughout the Early Chinese period, and therefore could not be studied by using the traditional hermeneutical categories.

The military in early nineteenth century China (1800-1840) has often been portrayed as an institution in steep decline, its troops addicted to opium and its officers incompetent and corrupt. This dissertation argues that the narrative of decline has overshadowed significant changes in the relation between military and society during the same period. These changes were shaped most profoundly by the White Lotus War (1796-1804), a major conflict between the Qing dynasty and White Lotus sectarians in central China.

Many of the most neglected effects of the White Lotus War emerged through the deaths and lives of its military participants. In the decades after the war, the tens of thousands of Chinese war dead and military veterans, most of them members of the Green Standard branch of the Qing military, became the focus of cultural practices across the empire. These men are the main subjects of the dissertation. Chapters 2 to 4 explore the commemoration and representation of the Chinese war dead, with case studies on the construction of prefectural Manifest Loyalty Shrines, the issuing and reception of hereditary titles to officers killed in battle, and the writing and compilation of nonofficial and official biographies. Chapters 5 to 7 look at the veterans of the war, men who took advantage of loosening state control over discourse on military topics to tell their own stories and were, in turn, the objects of fascination at many levels of society.

The cultural practices discussed in the dissertation emerged at the intersection of state initiatives, cultural tradition, representational space, and personal history. They were a sign of both the hegemony of ideas about the state and the limits of the Qing state as a system. I suggest that the early nineteenth century state took on the role of a cultural authority, authorizing certain sites and symbols related to war as legitimate objects of cultural practice, but increasingly unable or unwilling to directly choreograph war commemoration and military spectacle. The elaborate and top-down production of military culture that had been typical of the Qianlong reign (1736-1795) gave way under the Jiaqing emperor (1796-1820) to diverse practices organized but not controlled by the state.

My dissertation deals with cultural confrontations between the so-called “barbarian/nomadic” North and the “civilized/Sinitic” South in the multi-lateral world of Middle Period China (800–1300). The Jin dynasty (1115–1234), ruled by the Jurchen conquering minority, has received insufficient scholarly attention especially in the literary field. It was dismissed in late imperial China as either an illegitimate, alien regime compared to the Han Chinese-ruled Southern Song polity (1127–1279), or a scaled-down and short-lived predecessor of the Mongol Yuan empire (1271–1368). My research, however, fleshes out the overall Jin literary culture and poetic production in particular, and illustrates the burgeoning literati culture in North China under Jurchen rule. By demonstrating a rival narrative of claiming China in the Sino-Jurchen North against the cultural orthodoxy conceptualized in the Han Chinese-ruled South, I argue for the plurality and constructedness of Middle Period China as an intersubjective, transcultural, and border-crossing space.To envision a comprehensive picture of Jin dynasty poetry and literati culture, my dissertation is organized in a tripartite structure with seven chapters. Chapters 1 to 3 outline the cultural history of Jin literati community. Integrating socio-historical studies and bibliographical research, I examine the origins and developments of Jin literati, including both Jurchens and Han Chinese, as well as their identity negotiation and cultural legitimacy under Jurchen rule. Chapters 4 and 5 compare the contemporary northern and southern literary fashions. In particular, I combine literary analysis and digital tools to map out both discursive force and social networking that shaped the Jin literati group. Chapters 6 and 7 shift from poetry contests in the North-South space to literary traditions of the past – they explore the historical provenances of Jin literati culture, as well as the Jin refashioning of poetic legacies from previous Tang and Northern Song dynasties. Jin material culture including book history and literati art are also integrated into relevant discussions. In conclusion, I argue that the pluralist topology of Northern Song, Southern Song, and Jurchen Jin literary pasts kept intertwined with and superposed on each other, which always potentially spoke for the heteroglossia and constructedness of Middle Period China.

This dissertation investigates the world’s global entanglement with China through what I call classic Chinese novels’ “global media climates.” From the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) to the “rise of China” after the millennium, classic Chinese novels such as Xiyouji (Journey to the West) and Sanguo Yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), have circulated around the world in the forms of translations, rewritings, theatrical, and other media adaptations. However, three dominant approaches have thus far limited our understanding of such phenomenon. First, the China-centered approach, which assumes that the novels’ spread symbolizes “Chinese influence” over its neighbors. Second, the China-decentering approach, which accentuates how the novels have been re-appropriated or absorbed as “national canons” in, for example, Japan or Korea. Third, the transnational and pluralist approach, which fully acknowledges the portable use of classic Chinese novels in multiple contexts. While this third approach correctly highlights heterogeneity, it still fails to explain why multitudinous agents across times, spaces or even races, have to and want to assert their own “versions” by returning and resorting to, as well as (re)playing with and participating in the very same infrastructure of classic Chinese novels from time to time. This dissertation suggests that the answer lies with classic Chinese novels themselves – their forms of affect, as well as their affordance of imaginative materials for collaborative world-making. Drawing from new materialism, actor-network theory, ecocriticism, affect theory and infrastructuralism, this dissertation shows how the ecological, formal, affective and infrastructural qualities of classic Chinese novels distinctively afford (i.e. providing materials for) and invite adaptations to globally take place as world-making events. Theorizing Hongloumeng and Jin Ping Mei’s affordances of ecological forms, affective worldmaking and infrastructural network as “global media climates” in the 20th and 21st century, this dissertation adopts a non-anthropocentric approach in showing how cosmological forms of affect (such as “water” in Daoism, and “wind” as conceived in Chinese and East Asian literature) serially link the original novels to each and all of their adaptations across times, spaces, and cultures, dissolving the human-non-human as well the socialism-and-capitalism dichotomy in the age of Anthropocene and Sinocene.

This dissertation examines the role of intermediaries and ritual in reconciling conflicting interests in fifteenth century Japan. The first half of the century was a moment of comparative peace but also desperate improvisation. Administrative and judicial institutions survived but overlapped and were mutable, bending to the erratic demands of warlords. The dissertation argues that oaths and ceremonies provided certainty where institutions no longer could, structuring communities to enable conflict resolution at relatively predictable intervals. Unofficial intermediaries, here called conciliators, stepped in for devalued official ones, using their prestige to intercede with authority figures and buffer disputes or reinforce settlements. These pragmatic expedients fueled the personalization of power, revealing the process by which individuals absorbed the power of institutions.Central Japan in the fifteenth century produced an unusual preponderance of materials that reveal the negotiations underlying official action. These include diary-chronicles (kanbun nikki), many of them by professional intermediaries and others by people who relied on their aid; the lists, drafts, social poetry, and other semi-ephemeral documents on the reverse sides of the paper used to produce the diary-chronicles (shihai monjo); and the meeting records of councils that governed a large and wealthy temple. These, supplemented by sources more focused on final outcomes, are analyzed through two primary lenses: ritual and communication via intermediaries. Both intermediaries and ritual, individually and in concert, bridged the gaps between institutional structures and what the people inhabiting them could achieve and accept. By examining the ways that these strategies served communities’ needs while widening the very gaps they bridged, the dissertation illuminates a change often dismissed as mere decline: the loss of interconnected multi-regional institutions—even as inter-regional trade and communication expanded—in favor of the increased authority of individuals over their immediate communities.

My dissertation is a history of the nine ranks system, an institution that guided the selection of officials in early medieval China (220-589), with an emphasis on the intellectual dimension of its inception, development, and impacts. The two central questions I seek to answer are: why did China adopt this unique system of arraying official candidates into nine ranks for more than three hundred years? What impact did this political institution have over Chinese individuals, over their social and intellectual lives? By examining primary sources from this period, I characterize the nine ranks system as a meritocratic experiment that sought to overcome the shortcomings of the recommendation-based system yet diverged from its initial design and further stifled social mobility in this period. Moreover, by analyzing the intellectual discourses about the nine ranks, I contend that this political institution also shaped the social and religious lives of individuals through its impact on their perceptions of merit, power, order, and social hierarchy.

"Spontaneity" is a central albeit problematic concept in Chinese and European aesthetics and ethics. Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037-1101), whose literary and artistic creativity opened a new era in Chinese aesthetics, is regarded as a "natural" and "spontaneous" genius. By examining his life and works, this dissertation aims to reveal the paradoxes and dialectics beneath the ideological construct of "spontaneity." Through close reading, the rhetoric of spontaneity is found to define Su Shi's artistic pursuit, justify his material possession (in the form of connoisseurship), fashion a literary and political persona, and provide religious relief. Further, after rejecting the naïve notion of "spontaneity" as unpremeditated, unintentional, and immediate, I attempt to present a more nuanced understanding of spontaneity that embraces mediacy, including materiality, craft, learning, rules, ritual, and tradition. Such a dialectic notion consistently underlies Su Shi's diverse writings on art and natural beauty and is based upon his theory of human nature.

Throughout this project, close reading is integrated with critical thinking, informed by a range of theories and perspectives. Chinese native intellectual traditions that have influenced Su Shi's thinking are examined as such. Western aesthetic, anthropological, and ethical theories provide systems of reference.The internal logic in Su Shi's thinking on related issues leads my inquiry from the aesthetics of art to the aesthetics of nature, and finally to ethics (defined as the study of the best-lived life). This dissertation is accordingly divided into three parts, each consisting of two chapters.

The first part problematizes the notion of "artistic spontaneity" by analyzing the role and function of art as "skillful means" in the pursuit of enlightenment. Su Shi's understanding of human nature provides a common basis for his theories on artistic and ethical spontaneity alike.The second part discusses how natural beauty is constructed as the paradigm of art and, in this very process, becomes the after-image of art. Su Shi's connoisseur literature on flowers and rocks are examined, and the historical transformations in the cultural meaning of related natural objects are discussed. The third part discusses Su Shi's pursuit of complete spiritual and corporeal spontaneity. He emulated the cultural models of ancient poets and practiced the occult art of Daoist alchemy; in both kinds of activities ritualized behavior and cultural paradigms functioned as medium. Thus his understandings of artistic and ethical spontaneity share the same dialectic model: not only both are mediated, but both mean unimpeded resignation in the course of active and constant self-improvement.

The eighteenth century witnessed unprecedented expansion of the Qing realm, and this study examines how some of these changes were reflected onto imperial medicine at the center. Institutional history suggests that one aspect was the representation of people from different backgrounds in imperial medical posts. Dynamic changes in the structure and function of medical organizations point to the value of examining the breadth of medical knowledge and practices under the authority of the emperor during this time. Qing imperial medicine was pluralistic with respect to institutions, posts, medicines, languages, and medical conceptions. Multiplicity, as a principle and a practical solution, facilitated continuity, representation, as well as the integration of medical organizations with those of bureaucratic nature. Within such a context, having the ability to mobilize a range of medical practitioners could also serve to increase the power of the rulership.

Imperial medicine in China was greatly restructured during the eighteenth century. The Imperial Pharmacy, which had been part of the Imperial Medical Bureau, gained relative independence before being integrated into the Imperial Household Department, where its functions expanded. During this time, the Imperial Medical Bureau became more distant from the Ministry of Rites with which it had been affiliated, and was increasingly overseen by the Imperial Household Department. Organizational plurality could be found beyond these examples. A class of specialty bonesetters at an institution that managed imperial horses reflected the overlapping spheres of human and equine medicine.

The organization of medicine provided space for individual cultural and practical spheres while also allowing for interaction. The study of plurality in imperial medical institutions reveals a variety of human actors, as well as the role of mobility in the day-to-day functioning of medical affairs. Moreover, the multi-lingual context of the Qing points to the value of considering the various meanings of a particular term or name across a spectrum of languages.

Multiplicity was also exhibited through the differing conceptions of the body in three imperially commissioned textual sources: a five-language dictionary, a Manchu manuscript on anatomy that was a “translation” of a Western treatise, and a text for establishing medical orthodoxy. The latter was widely distributed, and a part of it found a new life in Japan, thereby showing how imperial medicine existed far beyond the palace gates, including the social history of medicine within a wider East Asian context.

This dissertation explores Japanese commercial, intellectual, and material engagement with medicines imported by the United East India Company (VOC) and its successors from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Medicinal substances sourced from across India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East like cinnamon, cloves, and saffron constituted a major part of Dutch trade to Japan from the seventeenth century onward. Various disruptions and reorganizations of the Dutch trading network at the turn of the nineteenth century caused an increase in the supply of these goods to Japan. This coincided with renewed scholarly efforts to translate and adapt “Dutch medicine” (ranpō) for use by Japanese physicians, apothecaries, and consumers. Interest in and consumption of “Dutch medicine” peaked in the nineteenth century, and it was available across Japan as commercial medicine (baiyaku) sold in shops and by itinerant merchants. Drawing from a wide range of visual, material, and textual sources in Japanese, Dutch, and literary Chinese, this study contributes to a better understanding of the objects, mechanisms, and agents involved in early modern global trade. The Dutch trade in medicinal substances was representative of the inherently hybrid and intra-Asian nature of the goods and ideas brought to Japan by the VOC and its successors. The adaptation and consumption of these products engaged a diverse group of historical actors beyond the socio-political elite, most notably apothecaries and merchants who leveraged growing interest in “Dutch medicine” to sell their wares. As a whole, this dissertation dismantles the teleological and Eurocentric narratives of rangaku and “Dutch influence” that have informed so many histories of early modern and modern Japan, instead offering an understanding of medicine and medical knowledge that is shaped by global circulations, local practices, and the diversity of the early modern marketplace.

This dissertation delves into the evolution of the concept of newness in early imperial China, arguing that its emergence as a positive attribute was neither self-evident nor inevitable but the result of a deliberate intellectual construction spanning from the third century BCE to first century CE. The Western Han dynasty (206 BCE–9 CE) is often perceived as a period of consolidation and stagnation, dominated by a sanctioned Confucian orthodoxy and marked by a perceived lack of innovation. Yet Han intellectuals actively theorized and valorized “newness” (xin 新), shaping a discourse that framed their own time as a moment of renewal and creative transformation.Drawing on a range of sources, including canonical texts, historiographical narratives, philosophical treatises, and court discussions, this dissertation seeks to reconstruct the intellectual and discursive landscape of the Han dynasty, uncovering perspectives that have been obscured by later historians and modern interpretive frameworks. It foregrounds key figures in the mid-to-late Western Han such as Liu Xiang 劉向 (77–6 BCE), Yang Xiong 揚雄 (53 BCE–18 CE), and Huan Tan 桓譚 (ca. 23 BCE–56 CE), illuminating how their writings contribute to the construction of newness as both a rupture from the past and a continuation of traditions. Rather than merely reflecting historical change, the discourse of newness in this period functioned as a critical agent in shaping imperial ideology, historiography, and intellectual production. This dissertation thus reinterprets Han intellectual history by demonstrating that its scholars did not merely preserve or systematize earlier traditions but conceptualized their era as one of dynamic transformation. In doing so, it contributes to broader discussions on historical consciousness and intellectual renewal in imperial China, challenging narratives that marginalize the Han in accounts of Chinese intellectual history.

My dissertation is driven by the desire to understand time in the era of hypermediation, when images are no longer mimesis but the driving force for reality. Exploring Japanese cinema, photography, and critical thoughts from the 1960s to 1980s as well as the philosophy of time in the long 20th century, I theorize expressing time as a critical phenomenology of time that generates the affect of resistance to confront the technological maneuver of space-time, from the inception of storage media to the Cold War paradigm of cybernetics and system thinking.

This dissertation explores how people living in the city of Edo (present-day Tokyo) in the latter half of the Tokugawa period (1603–1868) dealt with illness. Doctor-based care has most often captured the attention of historians, but the proportion of time doctors physically spent with patients was dwarfed by that provided by domestic caregivers. To elucidate the medical landscape of Edo and describe how urban residents cared for sick family members, I draw from a rich body of family records. These include more than a dozen diaries and over fifty family records written between 1750 and 1868, composed by men and women of diverse social status and occupation such as samurai, commoners, popular authors, and doctors.

Chapter One illustrates how day-to-day management of illness was implemented by family members rather than by medical practitioners, demonstrating the key role of women as mobile caregivers and the ways in which illness bound families together. Chapter Two examines what sufferers consumed when they fell ill, revealing the importance of adjusting diet, self-medicating, and record keeping within the home. Chapter Three depicts the role of religious sites and therapies in the lives of Edo residents, showing the importance of family members’ prayer by proxy.

Against this backdrop of therapeutic options, Chapter Four explores how families interacted with medical practitioners by using the records of three Edo physicians to trace their daily routines. Diaries of families who hired physicians show that they often saw several doctors over the course of a single illness. Seeing a doctor was not a binary relationship between patient and practitioner but an enterprise that mobilized multiple family members. Chapter Five argues that illness in late Tokugawa Japan was a social event on the scale of weddings or births—one that could bring dozens of visitors to the home, all bringing gifts. In total, this dissertation contends that health care in early modern Japan was rooted in the family, and that the patterns of therapeutic practice seen in early modern diaries were fundamentally shaped by familial participation in illness management.