Buddhist Manuscript Cultures in Premodern Japan

Recent discoveries and scholarship on Japanese Buddhist manuscripts have illuminated new areas of research and raised previously unexplored questions in Buddhist studies and East Asian religions. This article introduces some of the recent finds and approaches to these materials. It focuses on three sets of sources: scriptorium documents from an imperial treasure house known as the Shōsōin, canonical manuscripts (issaikyō) based on texts translated or composed in China, and sacred works (shōgyō) produced and collected by Japanese monks for use in temple life. In addition to surveying these sources and the most influential secondary literature on them, this article proposes methodological alternatives to philological studies by focusing on what I call ritual, curricular, social, and material approaches

Price shocks in regional markets: Japan's great Kantō Earthquake of 1923

Japan’s Great Kantō Earthquake of September 1st 1923 devastated the area around Tokyo and the country’s main port of Yokohama. This paper uses the earthquake as a case study to inform our understanding of the economics of disasters and the history of market integration. It seeks to test two main assumptions: firstly, that shifting demand and supply curves consequent on a disaster will have some impact on prices; and secondly, that any local changes in the disaster region are likely to be diffused across a wider geographical area. We make use of a unique monthly wholesale price dataset for a number of cities across Japan, and our analysis suggests three main findings: that price changes in the affected areas immediately following the disaster were in most cases reflected in price changes in Japan’s provincial cities; that cities further away from the devastation witnessed smaller price changes than those nearer to the affected area; and that the observed pattern of price changes reflects the regional heterogeneity identified by scholars who have worked on market integration in Japan

Global Norms, Local Activism, and Social Movement Outcomes: Global Human Rights and Resident Koreans in Japan

The authors integrate social movement outcomes research and the world society approach to build a theoretical model to examine the impact of global and local factors on movement outcomes. Challenging the current research on policy change, which rarely examines the effects of global norms and local activism in one analysis, they argue (1) that global regimes empower and embolden local social movements and increase pressure on target governments from below, and (2) that local activists appeal to international forums with help from international activists to pressure the governments from above. When the pressures from the top and the bottom converge, social movements are more likely to succeed. Furthermore, these pressures are stronger in countries integrated into global society and on issues with strong global norms. The empirical analysis of social movements by resident Koreans in Japan advocating for four types of human rights—civil, political, social/economic, and cultural—demonstrates that the movements produced more successes as Japan\u27s involvement in the international human rights regime expanded since the late 1970s, and that activism on issues with strong global norms achieved greater successes. The analysis also shows that lack of cohesive domestic activism can undercut the chances of social movements\u27 success even with strong global norms on the issue