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TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS IN THECB
Kathryn Meyer
€ 67.97
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Description for TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS IN THECB
Hardcover. Series: State & Society in East Asia. Num Pages: 306 pages, 11 black & white illustrations, 34 black & white halftones, 2 tables. BIC Classification: 1FPC; 3JJH; HBJF; HBLW. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 238 x 161 x 26. Weight in Grams: 556.
This compelling book provides a rare glimpse into the heart of wartime China. Kathryn Meyer draws us into the perilous world of the Garden of Grand Vision, a ramshackle structure where a floating population of thousands found shelter from the freezing Siberian winter. They had come to the northern city of Harbin to find opportunity or to escape the turmoil of China in civil war. Instead they found despair. As the author vividly describes, corpses littered the halls waiting for the daily offal truck to cart the bodies away, vermin infested the walls, and relief came in the form of addiction. Yet the Garden also supported a vibrant informal economy. Rag pickers and thieves recycled everything from rat pelts to cigarette butts. Prostitutes entertained clients in the building’s halls and back alleys. These people lived at the very bottom of Chinese society, yet rumors that Chinese spies hid among the residents concerned the Japanese authorities. For this population lived in Manchukuo, the first Japanese conquest in what became the Second World War. Thus, three Japanese police officers were dispatched into the underworld of occupied China to investigate crime and vice in the Harbin slums while their military leaders dragged Japan deeper into the Pacific War. While following these policemen, the reader discovers a remarkable and unexpected view of World War II in East Asia. Instead of recounting battles and military strategy, this book explores the margins of a violent and entrepreneurial society, the struggles of an occupying police force to maintain order, and the underbelly of Japanese espionage. Drawing on the author’s years of rediscovering the historical trail in Manchuria and research based on top-secret Japanese military documents and Chinese memoirs, this book offers a unique and powerful social and cultural history of a forgotten world.
Product Details
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2014
Publisher
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Condition
New
Series
State & Society in East Asia
Number of Pages
306
Place of Publication
Lanham, MD, United States
ISBN
9781442223523
SKU
V9781442223523
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-15
About Kathryn Meyer
Kathryn Meyer is professor of history at Wright State University. Her books include Webs of Smoke: Smugglers, Warlords, Spies, and the History of the International Drug Trade.
Reviews for TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS IN THECB
This is real history. Drawing on impeccable Japanese-language first-hand documents, Kathryn Meyer has given us a story never before told in English. She sets the action in the larger context of events in Asia and in North Manchuria as World War II approached, yet she also recounts the scenes of alleyway sex that provided enough cash for another hit of opium. Written in a lively and colorful style, this is a book you won’t be able to put down.
Ronald Suleski, Suffolk University, Boston Life and Death in the Garden is riveting. Kathryn Meyer leads readers on a tour de force visit to a long-forgotten Manchurian ghetto in which people sought any means possible to survive foreign occupation, economic dislocation, and social decline. This is history at its best, teeming with characters that Meyer carefully recreates to locate in their local, national, and international contexts. Their lives are as fascinating as they are tragic and they bring to life this time and place with unprecedented clarity. Meyer’s decades of research are reflected in equal measures of effective storytelling and historical reconstruction. An outstanding addition to the growing fields of Manchurian and Manchukuo studies, her book will inspire great interest in a part of China most often overlooked. And it is a great read.
Norman Smith, University of Guelph; author of Intoxicating Manchuria: Alcohol, Opium, and Culture in China’s Northeast Here is something new: a history of hell frozen over. Kathryn Meyer takes us on a Dickensian tour of Harbin’s "Garden of Grand Vision," a frigid Manchukuo slum where thieves snatched rags from the dying; pimps beat fourteen-year-old prostitutes; and everyone sought oblivion in narcotics, sex, and gambling. Along the way she tells of the dismemberment of China, the perils of frontier migration, the workings of underground economies, and the collapse of Japanese imperialism, blending a unique microhistory with a narrative of one of history’s great tragic dramas.
David Courtwright, author of Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World
Ronald Suleski, Suffolk University, Boston Life and Death in the Garden is riveting. Kathryn Meyer leads readers on a tour de force visit to a long-forgotten Manchurian ghetto in which people sought any means possible to survive foreign occupation, economic dislocation, and social decline. This is history at its best, teeming with characters that Meyer carefully recreates to locate in their local, national, and international contexts. Their lives are as fascinating as they are tragic and they bring to life this time and place with unprecedented clarity. Meyer’s decades of research are reflected in equal measures of effective storytelling and historical reconstruction. An outstanding addition to the growing fields of Manchurian and Manchukuo studies, her book will inspire great interest in a part of China most often overlooked. And it is a great read.
Norman Smith, University of Guelph; author of Intoxicating Manchuria: Alcohol, Opium, and Culture in China’s Northeast Here is something new: a history of hell frozen over. Kathryn Meyer takes us on a Dickensian tour of Harbin’s "Garden of Grand Vision," a frigid Manchukuo slum where thieves snatched rags from the dying; pimps beat fourteen-year-old prostitutes; and everyone sought oblivion in narcotics, sex, and gambling. Along the way she tells of the dismemberment of China, the perils of frontier migration, the workings of underground economies, and the collapse of Japanese imperialism, blending a unique microhistory with a narrative of one of history’s great tragic dramas.
David Courtwright, author of Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World