"Based on extensive archival research in Malaysia, Great Britain, Japan and the United States, Red Star Over Malay provides an account of the way the Japanese occupation reshaped colonial Malaya, and of the tension-filled months that followed surrender. This book, now in its third edition, is fundamental to an understanding of social and political developments in Malaysia during the second half of the 20th century."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Anuta is a small Polynesian community in the eastern Solomon Islands that has had minimal contact with outside cultural forces. Even at the end of the twentieth century, it remains one of the most traditional and isolated islands in the insular Pacific. In Oral Traditions of Anuta, Richard Feinberg offers a telling collection of Anutan historical narratives, including indigenous texts and English translations. This rich, thorough assemblage is the result of a collaborative project between Feinberg and a large cross-section of the Anutan community that developed over a period of twenty-five years. The volume's emphasis is ethnographic, consisting of a number of texts as related by the island's most respected experts in matters of traditional history. Feinberg's annotations, which arm the reader with essential ethnographic and historical contexts, clarify important linguistic and cultural issues that arise from the stories. The texts themselves have important implications for the relationship of oral tradition to history and symbolic structures, and afford new evidence pertinent to Polynesian language sub-grouping. Further, they provide insight into a number of Anutan customs and preoccupations, while also suggesting certain widespread Polynesian practices dating back to the pre-contact and early contact periods.
This work, divided into two volumes, is the study of the history of words in the Austronesian (An) languages—their origin in Proto-Austronesian (PAn) or at later stages and how they developed into the forms that are attested in the current An languages. A study of their history entails the reconstruction of the sound system (phonology) of PAn and an exposition of the sound laws (rules) whereby the original sounds changed into those attested in the current An languages. The primary aim of this work is to examine exhaustively the forms that can be reconstructed for PAn and also for the earliest stage after the An languages began to spread southward from Taiwan. For the later stages—that is, forms that can be traced no further back than to the proto-languages of late subgroups, we do not attempt to be exhaustive but confine ourselves to only some of the forms that are traceable to those times, treating those that figure prominently in the literature on historical An linguistics or those that have special characteristics important for understanding in general how forms arose and the processes that led to change. In short, the aim of this study is not just to reconstruct protomorphemes and order the reflexes according to the entries they fit under, but rather to account for the history of each fom1 that is attested and explain what happened historically to yield the attestations. Volume 2 of the Proto-Austronesian Phonology is divided into four parts and contains a glossary, finder lists from the English translation, a bibliography, and an index.
Information on the Japanese Occupation of Malaya and Singapore is sparse, and Japanese-language materials are particularly difficult to find because the Japanese military systematically destroyed war-related documents when the war ended. The contributors to this volume participated in a Forum that spent four years locating surviving materials relating to the Occupation of Malaya. The group has three objectives: to collect primary sources, to interview Japanese military and civilian officials who took part in the military administration and people in Malaysia and Singapore who experienced the period, and to publish the results of the studies. Based on interviews with Japanese, Malaysians and Singaporeans who lived through the war years and materials gathered from archives and libraries in Britain, Malaysia, Singapore, USA, Australia, and India, the Forum has produced a number of Japanese-language publications. This book makes available some of their research findings in English. Topics covered include the Watanabe Military Administration, Japanese research activities in Malaya, Japan's Economic Policies, Malayan Communist Party Leaders and the Anti-Japanese Resistance, the Massacre of Chinese in Singapore, Railway Transportation during the Japanese Occupation Period, The Singapore internment Camp for Allied Civilian Women, and the Japanese Surrender. This volume is a revised version of Akashi Yoji, ed., Nippon Senryoka no Eiryo Maraya/Shingaporu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten Publishers, 2001). Book jacket.
Japan attacked British-ruled Malaya on 8 December 1941 as part of a wave of military actions that toppled the British, Dutch and American colonial regimes in Southeast Asia. Within seventy days, the conquest of Malaya was complete, and British forces in Singapore surrendered on 15 February 1942. The three and a half years of Japanese rule are generally considered to mark a profound transition in the history of the Malay peninsula, but little is known about this period. This book uses the limited administrative papers that survived in Malaya, oral sources, and accounts written by Japanese officers involved in the Malayan campaign to flesh out the story.
