Les politiques d’assistance envers les vétérans infirmes au Japon durant le 20ème siècle

The following study provides an insight into Japanese policies on wounded veterans’ relief during the twentieth century. During the long war (1937–1945) with China and later with the Allied Forces (1941–1945), the Japanese government established strong physical, occupational and spiritual rehabilitation programs in addition to several laws that provided pensions or allowances for military disabilities. After the defeat in 1945, under the Occupation’s new rules of democratization and demilitarization, wounded veterans quickly lost all their benefits. Furthermore, their image was devalued in the eyes of society and their voices were marginalized. However, because of their struggles, the State established a new non-discriminatory law for all disabled people. Nevertheless, after the return of Japanese autonomy in 1952, the wounded veterans still felt that they were not treated adequately because no law addressed their specific circumstances. In order to attain their goal, they created a new association of disabled veterans to express their frustration and to lobby the Japanese government for change. Because of their stubborn mobilization, the Law for Special Aid to the Wounded and Sick Retired Soldiers was finally enacted in 1963 and provided veterans with the assistance they needed and for which they had long-since been asking.

Navigating and resisting the compulsory military service in Iran: embodied experiences of non-heterosexual Iranian men

In the homosocial space of the all male military service, (hetero)masculinity and gender normativity are promoted and bravery and warrior mentality are highly valued. On this basis, policing gender and sexuality is a relevant issue, aiming to reward heteronormativity and hyper masculinity and marginalize non heterosexuality and gender nonconforming performances. In the Iranian context, since the Iran Iraq war (1980–1988), military service has produced a feature of militarized (hetero)masculinities through the cult of martyrdom. It enforces soldiers to stand up against the enemy, be willing to seek martyrdom and sacrifice themselves in order to protect the Islamic Iranian homeland. It is a symbol of entering adulthood and during that time young men are expected to embody the official ideology which revolves around heteronormativity and strict gender norms. In this context, the focus of this paper is the embodied experiences of those young conscripts who do not embody the (hetero)masculine ideal, because they are either non heterosexual or do not fit into the strict regime of gender. Drawing on ethnographic data, and policy documents, this paper shows how the idea of the (hetero)masculine ideal has been translated into practice through the dispositif of the sarbazi and how some young Iranian non heterosexual men try to resist conscription while others try to find ways to carve out a liminal heterotopic space during their military service.

Naufragés japonais et leur rôle dans les relations nippo-occidentales: Défis d’une étude globale

Between 1633 and 1639, the Tokugawa shogunate had published a series of edicts, expelling all Westerners except the Dutch from the country, curtailing international commerce and missionary activities, as well as forbidding the Japanese from ever leaving their homeland. The Edo government maintained its isolationist course with varying degrees of success for more than two hundred years, finally caving in under foreign pressure in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Although the border control was exceptionally strict, small merchant craft and fisherman boats were still navigating between the islands of Japan. The sailors could rarely find a way back home after a shipwreck. Saved by passing whalers or washed ashore in a distant land, some of them survived their ordeal and ended up in the West where they were often employed as guides, interpreters and language teachers. Several countries sent diplomatic missions to Japan, using repatriation of castaways as a pretext to open negotiations with the shogunate. In this article, we will try to deconstruct the history of the relations between Japan and the Western powers through the eyes of these castaways and identify several methodological challenges that such a research entails.

Chinese literature and “New Methods of Midwifery” during the 1950s

The literary description of the movement, “New Methods of Midwifery,” during the 1950s is not only a historical record of the innovation of delivery techniques, but also a demonstration of the realization of bio-governance at the grassroots level, and of the reformation of traditional gender concepts. These works directly criticized outdated delivery methods and the traditional concept of life that traditional midwives observed and also documented the development of bio-politics in New China. The writers portrayed a series of images of traditional midwives and socialist midwives which left a traceable legacy of visions of Chinese professional women. This article aims to investigate the images of this special professional group and their cultural significance to the reformation of Chinese fertility culture, daily life and the development of bio-politics during the 1950s.

“Are you gay or do you do gay?” Subjectivities in “gay” stories on the Persian sexblog shahvani.com

The main goal of this study is to demonstrate the influence of local-traditional perceptions of sexuality in the construction of subjectivity among men involved in same-sex sexual practices in contemporary Iran. In order to do so, I shall briefly outline some essential features of the local-traditional understanding of sexuality, which I consider to be epistemologically and ontologically different from the modern concept of human sexuality. Subsequently, the continuity of the local-traditional understanding of sexuality in the identity construction of those individuals involved in same-sex sexual practices will be demonstrated through an inquiry on contemporary pornographic stories written by users of an online platform with erotic and pornographic content. I will argue that the perception of and the explanation for same-sex desire as well as the categorisations of subjects found in these stories point to the predominance of local-traditional patterns of thought in the imagination of the authors of these stories. However, it will also be demonstrated that the modern idea of sexuality is present among some other users of this platform, whose modern worldview is in conflict and competition with the local-traditional views on sexuality. This conflict is best illustrated in the commentary sections of the stories on this website, where modern-thinking users question the “truth” of the epistemology behind these local-traditional narratives. This modern users’ criticism of the local-traditional view on same-sex desire shall be addressed in the last part of the paper.

Sufism, subjectivity and parapsychology: refashioning the dirbāsha ritual among Sufis in modern Iraq

This paper explores the ritual of the dirbāsha as an extraordinary miracle performance and its role as a bodily practice in the formation of modern Muslim subjectivities among the Qādiriyya-Kasnazāniyya Sufi communities in Iraq. During the climax of collective dhikr gatherings, male Sufi novices perform extraordinary and dangerous acts, perforating parts of their bodies with swords or long skewers without seriously injuring themselves. From the Sufi perspective, this ritual is, first of all, interpreted as the miracle of a Sufi shaykh and not of the performing Sufi novice since it is seen as an expression and proof of God’s power as transmitted through the shaykh. Moreover, it has been argued that the ritual is constitutive for the formation of the religious subjectivity of the performing Sufi novice since it allows the embodiment of mystical concepts as emotional, sensorial and existential realities. For the individual ritual experience to work, the social construction and constant reframing of these “miracles” needs to be taken into account as well, namely the ordinary ethics of the extraordinary which allow the miracles to be perceived as such. The present case of the Kasnazāniyya will show how Sufis combined their pious with a modern, critical and self-reflexive subjectivity and successfully managed to reframe this highly controversial practice – which is criticised by religious reformists and secularists alike – beyond its traditional ritual context with the modern science of parapsychology.

Kūn’s ‘body’: the many appearances and meanings of the pure even-numbered trigram in the early Yìjīng and related texts

One of the main reasons why words (i.e., ‘images’) in the Yìjīng and Guīcáng might appear so enigmatic is because they have become detached from the ‘pictures’ (guàhuà 卦畫) or ‘bodies’ (guàtǐ 卦體), as divination results, in which diviners first recognized them. This paper has two objectives. The first, as part of a larger database project, uses early Chinese excavated materials to reconstruct and reimage the many configurations and appearances of trigram Kūn’s ‘body’ (Kūn tǐ 坤體). Seeing and thinking about the pure even-numbered, yīn trigram in its original configurations leads us toward a deeper appreciation and understanding of the complexity of this early system of divination, and doing so is integral to investigating, as a thought experiment, complex relationships between divination results (i.e., trigrams and hexagrams) and numbers, numbers and images, and images and predictions. Users of the Changes should no longer visualize Kūn’s ‘body’ as one-dimensional ☷ and . The second, examines images of trigram Kūn in the Yìjīng, with a starting point being the images in the canonical commentaries, and the Shuō guà commentary in particular, by using hermeneutic principles in the ‘numbers and images’ tradition. The Shuō guà presents images either found in or to be extrapolated from the base text within a structured and highly interpretive system that creates ‘image programs’ for each of the eight trigrams. I argue the Shuō guà’s image programs have a defined architecture, and its images are not random lists of words collected without an agenda and devoid of relationships and mutual interaction with others.

Framing the Qin collapse: redaction and authorship of the Shiji 史記

This paper explores the relationship between the Shiji’s authors and their sources by examining how they constructed the historical narrative of the fall of the Qin Empire. While Sima Qian and his father Sima Tan have been traditionally credited as the authors of the Shiji, their authorial voice was recently challenged by scholars. In response to the revisionist view, this paper discerns that the Shiji maintains a consistent narrative of the Qin collapse, which is generated through rigorous source redactions whereby Sima Qian and/or Sima Tan were able to incorporate their ideological agenda and personal opinions in subtle ways that are almost invisible to the reader. With such anonymity, the historiographers succeeded in establishing the authority of their historical narratives. Rather than simply juxtaposing the narratives of their sources, the Simas indeed authored their “patterned past” of the Qin collapse. However, the past constructed in the Shiji comprises various independent narratives whose plausibility is contingent upon the respective epistemic quality of their evidence rather than a harmonious discourse.

Rescuing the Muslim collective self: the Nur case in light of the Modern Muslim Subjectivities Project

There is a tendency in the literature to emphasise how contemporary Islamic movements promote ways of living a pious Muslim life alternative to those proposed by secular liberal modernity. For this reason, the domains of religious and civic engagement have often been thought of as opposed to each other. In counterpoint to this tendency, the paper explores the intertwining of national views about mass education and modern citizenship with a renewed Islamic emphasis on the need for moral and ethical reform of society within the Nur movement in modern Turkey. Methodologically, the paper draws upon ethnographic material from research conducted in 2010 on the Suffa community in Istanbul, as well as on an account of the life and projects of the leader of the movement, Said Nursi, mainly drawn from secondary sources. This case is explored in light of the theories of successive modernities that inspired the analytical framework for the Modern Muslim Subjectivities Project applied in this special issue. In so doing, it illustrates the complex nexus that Nursi established between long-standing views of Islamic ethics and modern perspectives on education and civic engagement in response to the emergence of the modern nation-state in the first half of the 20th century.