井の中の蛙

I still hate this time of year. Though the post and comments are of generally high quality, and the introduction of actual Japanese scholars and sources into the debate is welcome, I still haven’t seen anyone address the “sufficient ≠ necessary” issue to my satisfaction. There’s an awful lot of post hoc ergo propter hoc in the discussion, as well as an awful lot of “plausible, therefore true” fallacies on the other side.

It’s really one of the nastiest questions of historical causality: there’s counterfactuals, personality/psychological considerations, cultural considerations, long-term strategic and moral implications, the inevitability trap, and self-justification and distortion in the sources on all sides, not to mention huge gaps in the record on critical persons and times. The problem, really, is to approach it the way we do every other historical question, because to treat it as a sui generis issue (which it really looks like) can lead to the use of arguments and methods which are unacceptable in other contexts (and should be unacceptable in this one).

Like Eric Rauchway, I rarely spend a lot of time on the atomic bombings in either my World History or Japanese history courses, partially because, like him, I put it in the context of the general escalation of air war and military technology (a theme that runs through my World courses in particular) and partially because the debate is driven more by ethical than by historical questions. Otherwise we would have moved on ages ago, because the consensus position of Japanese historians reached almost a half century ago still largely stands: The combined shock of the atomic bombs and Soviet entry pushed the Japanese cabinet to the point where they could accept the unconditional end of the war, but things happened so fast that there’s really no way to tell whether one or the other would have been sufficient in isolation, nor can we know for sure whether a conditional surrender could have been reached earlier because nobody tried very hard.

The Asian History Carnival #20 is now up at Jottings from the Granite Studio! It comes in three parts:

Asian History Carnival #20 Part I

Asian History Carnival #20 Part II

Asian History Carnival #20 Part III

We are looking for volunteers to host the September and November installments. Read more on the carnival homepage.

I’m sitting in the Taiwanese National Library here in Taipei and just finished looking through an unusual publication put out in December, 1946 by 臺灣新生報社, the publisher of an important newspaper going by that name. It is entitled, 『民主とは何ぞや』(What is Democracy?)

What is immediately striking about the pamphlet is the fact that it is published in the Japanese language over a year after the end of the Japanese colonial period in August 1945. The general editor of the 臺灣新生報, Wu Jinlian (吳金煉) discusses the reason for this choice of language in a special explanatory preface:

本省は光復滿一週年を契機として新聞雜誌から日文版を撤廢した、日治五十年の必然結果として日語日文が本省の文化面に淺からぬ根を下していることは否定出來ない事實であるが、しかし光復と共に一日も早く速かにこの日本的殘滓を洗除すべきことは一般省民なかんづく青年層の國語國文の習熟度に鑑みる時，日文版の廢止は全く時期尚早の感なきを得ない。從つてここに當然何らかの過渡期的辦法が講究されなければならない。本叢書は實に如上の社會的要求に應じて生れたものである。

It says that Japanese versions of newspapers and magazines were banned¹ a year after the 1945 liberation of Taiwan but that no one can deny the depth of penetration of the Japanese language during the fifty years of Japanese colonial rule. While most people want to get rid of this “Japanese remnant,” it was simply not seen as realistic to completely abandon the use of Japanese in publications so soon, given the weak abilities of the youth in the “national language” (Mandarin Chinese). The pamphlet was thus published in Japanese in “response to this demand of society.”

While this is the only “issue” of what seems to be part of multiple similar publications that I could find in Taiwan’s National Library here, it was interesting to note that, in addition to some thirty pages dedicated to the main topic of defining and discussing what democracy is, some dozen or so pages of recent “Science News” were included in the back, including a list of nobel prize winners, all nicely summarized in Japanese for an audience that, presumably, prefers to or can only read it in that language.

The piece opens with a short history of fascism, along with an outline of Sun Yatsen’s (國父) approach to democracy, a detailed explanation of its relationship to ethnicity or race (民族) and a description of how Japan took advantage of cries for “self-determination” (民族自決) to peel away parts of the Chinese nation (8).

Another chapter talks about the social foundation for realizing democracy, including a section that opens with a sentence that shows the target for the readership: “We are what are known as intellectuals.” (我らはいはゆる知識分子である。21) Intellectuals are further described as the “leaders of society.” (社會のリーダである） Oh, those where the days, eh? Perhaps not.

One of the most interesting sections, however, is on the relationship between those in the military and democratic politics (軍人と民主政治 30-39). We can see this pre-2/28 incident publication as an example of the considerable freedom of press in Taiwan during the time not only in the fact that it was published in Japanese but in this section which offers a sustained critique of Chinese politics by blaming the failure of democracy in China on the close connections between military and political power. It is unlikely that the same critique would made it into print only a few months or a year later.

Since I need to focus on other things, I didn’t get a chance to read the whole thing thoroughly but 『民主とは何ぞや』 is an interesting look at a critique of Chinese politics and the promotion of democracy from the perspective of Japanese speaking Taiwanese intellectuals in late 1946. Check it out in a library (perhaps not so) close to you.²

1. I found a reference to this ban on Japanese which actually happens a bit later than this quote might suggest, not on August 15th but on October 25th, the first anniversary of Chen Yi’s official staging of the Taiwan handover: 「撤除本省境內所有新聞紙，雜誌附刊之日文版，並令各縣市政府遵照…」in 《臺灣光復和光復後五年省情》（上）p391. [↩]
2. You can request the work on the 6th floor Japanese/Korean materials room (日韓文室) of the Taiwanese National Library. Submit a request sheet there with the title and the call number 571.6 8444. [↩]

You grade sixty tests, and what do you get?
Three months older and deeper in debt.
St. Peter don’t you call me, cause I can’t go!
I owe book orders to the campus bookstore….

***

Books that still need to be written about Meiji Japan¹ :

• A good comprehensive history of the Meiji era²
• A good social history of the post-abolition samurai class. Aside from the Hirschmeier-Yamamura economic debate, there’s hardly anything.
• a full-length biography of Kido Takayoshi (aka Kido Kōin). We’ve got Ito, and Yamagata, and Okubo and Meiji (now we need an abridged one) and Katsura Taro and Shibusawa Eiichi, and Saionji Kimmochi.
• a history of the modernization of martial arts

***

Adamu at MutantfrogTravelogue did a nice survey of the Yasukuni Shrine’s Yushukan museum which ignited a 60-response comment thread. One of the subtler distortions in the Shrine is their history of Korea-Japan relations. Adamu writes

The arguments made did not seem particularly pernicious or dishonest, though certain claims (such as “Japan had repeatedly proposed national independence for Korea, but the West rejected the idea” prior to formal annexation in 1905) seemed kind of disingenuous.

My contribution to the comments was to clarify:

On the Korean issue, they are being blatantly disingenuous: the various calls for Korean independence were targetted at blunting the influence of other regional powers over the Korean court, on the grounds that—according to Japanese strategic calculations—the only natural and legitimate influence in Korea should be Japanese. They called for Korean independence from China before the Sino-Japanese war (after which China explicitly recognized Japanese interests in Korea), then independence from Russia before the Russo-Japanese war (after which Russia and the US explicitly recognized Japanese innterests in Korea). It’s still not a settled question as to when Korean annexation became Japanese policy, but there never was any question (after about 1876 or so) that control of Korea was critical to Japan’s strategic situation.

1. inspired by the difficulties my Meiji class students had with their topics [↩]
2. this is the only one of this list which I would consider taking on myself [↩]

After creating an OS X dashboard widget to converting Korean 檀紀 years into to western years, it was only a matter of time before another moment of distraction got me to playing with the idea of creating widgets for converting Japanese and Chinese calendars. After a long day of reading about US rice control policies in Korea 1945-1948, I treated myself to some more tinkering and managed to slap together a new widget for some Japanese dates:

Japan Calendar Converter Dashboard Widget v1.0

It unfortunately appears that the widget will not work on OS X versions earlier than 10.4.3.

When you install the widget, just select the period you want (or leave it on whatever period you used last), type the number of the year you want, and press return. It will convert the date into western years. It currently supports conversion from 明治, 大正, 昭和, and 平成 years. If there are a lot of comments here expressing interest, I can add earlier periods easily enough, but I won’t bother unless there is some demand for it.

UPDATE: While looking around for an online version of a chart detailing the conversion of pre-Meiji Japanese dates, I found that there is no reason for me to upgrade this little widget to cover the premodern. There is already a great widget out there with full support for these older periods. Anyone studying pre-modern Japanese history who uses a Mac should definitely check out the fantastic NegoCalc application, which includes a dashboard widget! Read more and download the application here:

NengoCalc Download Page

Sean Malloy has withdrawn the pictures once touted as “newly discovered” photographs of Hiroshima in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing. Over the last few days, after the pictures were reported by HNN, the Huffington Post, and Wired, among others, members of the Japanese studies community took a closer look and began to doubt. I saw it unfold at H-Japan: questions about the clothing worn by the people standing in the photos, injuries that didn’t match the atomic bombing, topography issues. Most of all, there were similarities to other known pictures from the Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and the anti-Korean/anti-leftist massacres which followed: the injuries, topography and clothing are more consistent with that disaster/atrocity. How the pictures acquired the Hiroshima story is still a mystery though, as one commenter pointed out, there’s a three day gap between the bombing and the first known pictures which we’d dearly love to fill.

By a curious coincidence, I (and a lot of other innocent scholars of Asia, I warrant) got an email from an ironically named Japanese group¹ whose sole purpose is to deny the realities of Japanese WWII atrocities, and one of their highlight publications is an attempt to debunk as many Nanjing Massacre photographs as possible. Daqing Yang, one of the premier scholars on the Nanjing Massacre has written

Even photographic evidence, as many of them have come to realize, can be fraught with danger if its origins cannot be ascertained. When a conservative Japanese daily newspaper made a news story out of a wartime photograph used with the wrong caption in Kasahara’s book, he offered a swift public apology for his negligence and replaced the photograph.94 One of Kasahara’s historian colleagues has included a cautionary note about the use of photographic evidence in a college textbook on historical sources, using the Rape of Nanjing as an example.95

A few days back, peacay wrote me to get clarification on a satirical map found in the ‘Block Prints of the Chinese Revolution’ collection at Princeton. The problem with it, what was confusing peacay, is that the map seemed to be too broad and didn’t say much about the 1911 Revolution. The archival commentary wasn’t helpful, being a general statement about the whole collection. So, I got a good look at it and reported back that it was actually a Japanese-drawn (that much peacay already knew, which is why I got the call) WWI satire, dated late 1914, and the sum total of Chinese commentary was to depict China as a Mandarin pig, anxiously looking at a rain gauge. (peacay has a nice detail shot of it) The rest of the collection seems to actually be from Shanghai and relate to the 1911 revolution (at least, I assume Alan would have said something!). I don’t know that Princeton is going to withdraw the out-of-place image — they’ve already got a disclaimer on the collection saying that they don’t endorse any of the sentiments contained therein — but I expect that their in-house cataloging is more detailed and accurate. I hope so, but that’s no protection for researchers who aren’t in New Jersey.

This is going to come up more and more: as archives and collections become more public, the likelihood of discovering errors (or worse, propogating them in our research) is going to increase. As others have noted, I’m sure, historians are rarely trained specifically in the critical use of visual evidence, photographic or artistic. I’ve seen some grossly overinterpreted and casually thoughtless uses of visual materials.² Nor are many archivists, though we rely heavily on their record-keeping and expertise. But it’s getting harder and harder to excuse this kind of carelessness, while our training is not at all keeping up with the materials we’re expected to use.

1. I’ll tell you if you really want, but I don’t want to give them any more publicity than they deserve [↩]
2. I used a world history textbook once which both: a. presented a photograph of modern African folk dancers in a chapter on pre-1500 African history, the only instance in which a modern photo was used as evidence in a pre-modern context; b. and claimed that the solemn expressions on native Americans in a mid-19c picture were evidence of their social and cultural plight instead of the long exposures of contemporary technology [↩]

Some great bargains at the Columbia University Press White Sale with lots of offerings in Asian history and literature.

I hear through the grapevine that the organizers of Otakon, the huge anime/manga/pop culture convention held every in August in Baltimore, are looking for academic papers and panels on East Asian art, history, and culture to round out their offerings. Interested parties should contact Omar Jenkins, Head of Programming.

Jeremiah Jenne over at Jottings from the Granite Studio¹ will be hosting an Asian history carnival sometime during the week of May 5th. If you have postings you would like to nominate for the carnival, please send them directly to Jeremiah. You can reach him at jgjenne at ucdavis.edu. Another way to submit nominations is to tag it on del.icio.us with the tags ahcarnival for regular blog postings or ahresources for Asian history related online resources.

1. The site is currently down, but Jeremiah will work to get it back up for next week [↩]

I’m pleased to announce the publication by Shinsensha of the translated version of Japanese Diasporas, ｼﾞｬﾊﾟﾆｰｽﾞﾃﾞｲｱｽﾎﾟﾗ, 足立伸子 （編著), including my article “一八八五～九四年の移住者への訓示.” ¹ I learned, in the process of writing this post, that my article (in the English language edition) is actually cited and used correctly on the Wikipedia Japanese Diaspora page: “The Japanese Government was keen on keeping Japanese emigrants well-mannered while abroad in order to show the West that Japan was a dignified society, worthy of respect.” I may have to revise my opinion of wikipedia, after all.

In other news, Manan Ahmed sent me this Japanese Robot video, and while watching it I was struck by the realization that the early modern Japanese robots are based on a much older Japanese technology: Bunraku puppets. In this video, for example, you can see a demonstration of how the facial features are manipulated.

1. Professional Question: Is the translation listed as a separate publication on the c.v.? If so, do you note that it is a translation of an earlier publication? If not, do you just list it under the original publication: “published in translation as….”? [↩]