JAH-Q 2 debut

Volume 2 of the Journal of Asian Humanities at Kyushu University (JAH-Q) (love the acronym) is now online in its entirety for your reading pleasure. (Also available as one big PDF at editor Cynthia Bogel’s faculty member page.) Bogel sez:

JAH-Q is an annual double-blind, peer-reviewed publication in English. We consider research articles, state-of-the-field essays, and short reports (conferences and other events) on Asian humanities subjects (broadly defined) for publication.

Issue 2 includes an article by Pawel Pachciarek on Kusama Yayoi (“[I also] explore potential Zen Buddhist influences in her unpublished play script ‘The Gorilla Lady’”); Elizabeth Tinsley’s consideration of Matsui Fuyuko and Itō Seiu in the context of kusōzu, a genre of painting depicting the female body in progressive stages of decay (don’t worry, it’s a Buddhist thing); and a review of Heather Blair’s Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan:

It achieves what all books should but few do: it is historically and philologically rigorous, determinedly interdisciplinary, theoretically sophisticated, and lucidly written. This brilliant book should go down as a classic, serving as a model for how place and pilgrimage should be studied both in Japanese religions and beyond.

Publisher Harvard University Press claims that the book draws on “archival sources, archaeological materials, noblemen’s journals, sutras, official histories, and vernacular narratives,” so philological rigor wouldn’t have been a trivial matter.