China/Libraries/Movies

Bruce Willis and Harvard Yenching

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 2 Comments

I dropped by Harvard-Yenching library this afternoon to pick up some books requested from the depository and look up a few more from my todo list. I noted down book locations to find on the shelves in three different columns on a scrap piece of paper:

1) English language books with library of congress numbers
2) Japanese books with library of congress numbers
3) Japanese books with a special Harvard-Yenching lookup number in the format of J xxxx[.xx] xxxx format.

Soon enough, I had a pile of books I just have to look at stacked about half a meter tall. Having brought my camera with me and not wanting to wait in line for the PDF scanners downstairs I snapped some photos of the few relevant pages from most of the books, using someone’s study carrel as my temporary workstation. The H-Y library is fantastic and filled with wonders, but the little tables that pass for carrels in those narrow book aisles offer only cramped working quarters.

It was Friday night and after dinner I decided to go see a bad action movie to unwind: the new movie “Red” with Bruce Willis. It was pretty bad, and there was hardly anyone in the theater. In fact, it was so bad I started checking my email while the movie was still going and debating on walking out.1

Suddenly, retired CIA agent Bruce Willis was in Chinatown, investigating the death of a Chinese-American New York Times writer who left behind a mysterious postcard with only a single number on the back.

Was it a phone number? No.
Was it a book in a library? Perhaps, but wait…it doesn’t look like a library of congress call number.

Suddenly Bruce hits on the solution! Obviously the number doesn’t look like an LOC call number because it is from the Harvard-Yenching classification system and refers to an Asian book!2

In order to provide the obligatory movie proof that “all spies are super polyglots” Bruce Willis then made his entry for the “2010 Worst Chinese spoken by a Hollywood Actor” award. I can’t remember what he said (was it, “I live in Wuhan?” Anyone catch it? This year I think he might actually beat Shia LaBeouf’s Chinese in the “Wall Street” movie sequel.)

Together with his completely useless kidnapped sidekick, a former weed dealer who left California to work in a pensions department in Kansas City, the protagonists made their way to the library to look up the mysterious book. Though the Harvard-Yenching classification is used by some other libraries, I assumed they made the drive up from NYC to Boston and was dazzled by the huge bright library they ended up in. The massive multi-floor monstrosity in which they found the Chinese book they were looking for with its supposed Harvard-Yenching classification call number was certainly a big contrast to the humble and cozy H-Y library. Was anyone else who has suffered through the movie been able to identify what library it is?

  1. Please don’t do this when at the movies if anyone is nearby who can see the bright glow of your smartphone…it is very annoying  ↩

  2. I don’t remember the number looking anything like an H-Y number but, trust me, this is not a movie you want waste time on picking out inaccuracies.  ↩

1945-1950/Food/Korea/US-Korea

Candy and School Lunches

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 1 Comment

In the New York Times yesterday there was an interesting article entitled, “Is Candy Evil or Just Misunderstood?” In particular it discussed the relationship between candy and children, their concerned parents, and schools with some reference to the work of candy historian Samira Kawash.

I thought of this article when I came across a rather different attitude taken to candy by the US forces running Korea just after the collapse of the Japanese empire. In the October 1946 summary report put out by the military government, we find the following little nugget:

The Department of Education received an allocation of 669,269 pounds of candy which will be sold at cost to all the elementary schools of South Korea with the suggestion that it be utilized to supplement school lunches. Distribution of the candy was begun in late October.1

  1. U.S. Army Military Government Activities in Korea 13 (October, 1946), 78.  ↩

China/Current Events/English/visual culture

Yellow Peril Mk 3.

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 10 Comments

Lots of people have already commented on the Chinese professor video, which is getting a lot of play in the US. If you have not seen it, it is  set in the year 2030, and shows a Chinese professor (an updated Fu Manchu) laughing at the Americans whose empire has fallen because (unlike China) they have allowed the government to interfere with the free market.

Fallows and others have pointed out how absurd the content is, and he suggests that we will see more like this. I suppose so, but I don’t predict ads claiming that Chinese Baozi are made with the blood of American babies till at least 2016.  Actually some of these anti-China ads are coming out already.

What I find most interesting about the Chinese professor ad though is the iconography. There are lots of administrators in my school who would no doubt laugh till they choked at the idea that in 2030 an advanced country would still be delivering educational products through the appallingly old-fashioned method of putting tuition-generating units and an instructional employee  in a room and having them talk.

Even more interesting are the Mao-period posters on the walls of the classroom. Are they predicting a resurgence of Maoism in China? Yes, the old guy gets some face time even now, but I have never seen anything like these in a Chinese lecture hall. Or maybe they wanted pictures that would say “”China” to an American audience. I presume the decision went something like this.

Pandas  -Say China, but are too cute to be a threat.

Yao Ming -Says China, but can’t stay healthy. Sick Man of Asia is not what we need here.

Ichiro Suzuki- Says China to Americans, still healthy and still hitting well, but Seattle stank last season. No threat.

Great Wall. Possible, but not scary enough. Just sits there. Sure you can see it from space, but how many Americans go into space nowadays?

So Mao is pretty much all that is left. I could actually imagine a world where by 2030 Chinese nationalists were recycling Maoist imagery as sort of a we Chinese are bad-asses type of thing. (Maybe not the Mao as bald guy pics, but certainly some of the heroic poses from the C-R stuff. )

China/English

Korean ethno-nationalism and sappy TV dramas

Posted on by gina / 1 Comment

I’m currently TAing for a class on Modern Korean history, and we just finished discussing the concept of minjok （民族 or minzu in Chinese) as it related to Korean nationalism and the creation of a national history.  Andre Schmid discussed the creation of the minjok paradigm in the early twentieth century among Korean nationalist historians, outlining the various ways they conceptualized a Korean history based on ethnicity. To me, the most interesting story of the Korean ethnic genealogy involved tracing the descendants of the mythical ancestor Tan’gun to lineages and tribes that inhabited land off the peninsula, allowing this particular historian, Kim Kyohon, to claim the tribes in the North and their dynasties, the Liao, Jin, and Qing, as Korean. In other words, the 1644 defeat of the Ming by the Qing marked the beginning of the “Choson-Qing” period, or the Southern Choson and the Northern Qing. The Qing, in this narrative, is Korean (this can be found in Korea Between Empires, pages 195-196).

Unfortunately, my students did not find this nearly as awesome as I did, so I post it here. And, not surprisingly, the battle is not over. This post by Martin Lewis takes us to today, when arguments between China and Korea over Korean melodramas continue the historical battle over ethnicity, nationalism, and legitimate claims to history.

China/English

A new resource

Posted on by gina / 1 Comment

For those who would like to read about new research in Chinese history without having to drudge through proquest, please check out a new website, Chinese History Dissertation Reviews. It’s a series of reviews of recently defended doctoral dissertations in Chinese history, offering a summary of the main arguments, the historiographical genealogy to which the author responds, and a list of the major archives/sources used in the dissertation. We would love to hear all of your feedback!

http://dissertationreviews.wordpress.com/

Academia/Books and Articles/Foreign Views/Historiography/Japan/Pedagogy

Data Visualization and Data Quality

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

The inestimable Rob MacDougall is running a course on Digital History, and even better, he’s running it more or less publicly! I’m getting all kinds of ideas here. On the other hand, it sometimes raises surprising problems. The unit on Data Visualization includes an assigned reading that looked like something I might use for historiography, David Staley, Computers, Visualization, and History: How New Technology Will Transform Our Understanding of the Past (M.E. Sharpe, 2003). But when I started looking through it, the first ‘data visualization’ presented was an illustration of Japanese history from William McNeill’s 1963 The Rise of the West that made my teeth clench. Rob asked me to explain what’s wrong with it, which is fair.

The caption reads

In addition to information about costume, architecture, and other forms of material culture, the figures in the diagram convey meaningful information through gesture and body language, the shading of figures, their relative sizes, and their location in the diagram

That’s all true, as far as it goes. The problem, of course, is whether the diagram is conveying accurate and clear information, and on both accounts it fails. I realize that I’m being a little unfair: the McNeill book was a survey text written almost a half-century ago, and the diagram is being used as an example of potential; it’s not being cited as an up-to-date description of Japanese history that would be acceptable today. Still, it’s worth talking about.
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China/Web Sites and Resources

Delicious spam

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

I got an e-mail from Online Colleges. It seems to be a semi-scam site that offers to connect you to on-line colleges without actually, from what I can tell, providing any real service. Needless to say, it would probably help them if they could give the site some veneer of academic content, and thus they have a list of 101 lectures on China. The page just links to lectures (academic and popular) already available on I-tunes and elsewhere, but some of them look pretty interesting. So if you are looking for something to listen too this is a good place to start.

http://www.onlinecolleges.net/2010/10/13/101-lectures-to-learn-all-about-china/

Anecdotes/China/China-U.S./Current Events/Economics/Foreign Views/Post-Mao

China, the Hobgoblin of Small Minds

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 4 Comments

I had a student ask me in class, recently, about whether China, among other countries, was planning to take advantage of our coming collapse to move into a position of world domination, that they had operational plans and expected the collapse to come momentarily. I responded by pointing out that most advanced nations develop contingency plans for a wide variety of possible future scenarios, so that the existence of a plan is no guarantee of it’s probability.

Then, today, I read about this 2006 Delaware Senate debate:

Republican Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell of Delaware said in a 2006 debate that China was plotting to take over America and claimed to have classified information about the country that she couldn’t divulge.

O’Donnell’s comments came as she and two other Republican candidates debated U.S. policy on China during Delaware’s 2006 Senate primary, which O’Donnell ultimately lost.

She said China had a “carefully thought out and strategic plan to take over America” and accused one opponent of appeasement for suggesting that the two countries were economically dependent and should find a way to be allies.

“There’s much I want to say,” she said at the time. “I wish I wasn’t privy to some of the classified information that I am privy to.”

This is four years old, now: have we seen considerable progress in the takeover of the US by China? Seems to me that we’ve been holding steady, mostly. My immediate thought is that a US economic/political collapse would leave China in a strong short-term position, but an extremely weak long-term one, given the interdependence of our economies and technology sectors. But I’m not privy to classified information.

China/Current Events/Qing

Hoping for charity, without getting faith involved

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 6 Comments

The New Republic has an article by Gordon Chang on the lack of philanthropy among China’s rich. As he points out, one of the things blocking the emergence of charity organizations is China is the Party, which is very reluctant to approve the creation of any sort of organization outside itself, so it is hard even for the ideologically approved very rich to get permission to do so. Of course they could just donate to organizations they don’t control, but Chinese rich people (like all people everywhere) are at least partially motivated to do good by the praise they can win for doing so publicly.1

This is too bad, in part because lots of people who could use help are not getting it, and in part because China could really use an active civil society that would feed the hungry, cloth the naked and heal the sick. The problem with that is that that sort of thing can shade off into comforting the afflicted, and that is getting into political criticism. The Chang article was a response to Bill Gates and Warren Buffett visiting China to try and encourage more charitable giving. Gates and Buffett come from a society where it is unthinkable that the state would prevent the very rich from doing whatever they want, but also from a society where the state has long since made its peace with charity. Actually, Western states did relatively little charity, leaving most of it to the church for a long time, and of course this has led to conflict, possibly most noticeably over control of education in a lot of Catholic countries.

In Late Imperial China, at least, providing benevolence to the people was always one of the duties of the state, and even when it was provided by the local elite (and they did a lot of it) they did so a surrogates of the state, not as representatives of a rival organization.2 This actually changed some in the Late Qing. Katheryn Edgerton-Tarpley discusses this in her book about the response to the great famine in Shanxi in the 1870s. Chinese charity, from orphanages and soup kitchens to providing education and sponsoring public improvements was always localized and particular. In response to the famine, however, elites in Shanghai began to take action on a national level, despite the fact that Shanxi was a long way away. Tarpley discusses how the newspaper Shenbao and its writers both organized charity on a new level and were implicitly critical of the government’s unwillingness to adopt new, Western methods to deal with this and other crises. For a government that accepts nurturing the people as one of its duties almost any form of organized charity outside the structure of the state is an implicit criticism. I’m not sure that the CCP really accepts nurturing the people as one of its duties at present, but I am not surprised that they are reluctant to see organizations doing this job for them and thus criticizing either their ability or their will. I’m not sure how this contradiction could be resolved, but it is depressing that the state can’t even work out some sort of arrangement with Jet Li, who I would not really call an oppositional figure.

  1. Even when you give money anonymously you are motivated in part by the warm glow you feel and only in part by the desire to do good for others. Since you can’t entirely untangle these motives in yourself I don’t find it all that helpful to try and do so when looking at others.  ↩

  2. I’m leaving out the Buddhists here, who were separate organizations and did charity but were not oppositional to the state.  ↩

Colonial/General/Korea/Korea-Japan

The Use of Collective Responsibility

Posted on by sayaka / 2 Comments

It is a famous fact that the Government-General in Taiwan adopted the baojia (保甲) system in 1898 in reaction to a series of attacks against the Japanese. It is a method of mutual policing at the village level for the purpose of maintaining local order and preventing tax evasion. Although GGT officials explained that it was a system that they were adopting from the old Chinese dynasties, it had already been a familiar style of policing for the Japanese too since Toyotomi Hideyoshi and others adopted it to police hidden Christians and so on.

I never encountered a mentioning of a similar system in the history of colonial police in Korea. For example, Matsuda Toshihiko’s recent publication, 日本の朝鮮植民地支配と警察 1905-1945 (Japan’s Colonial Rule of Korea and the Police. 2009), discusses how the police tried to propagate its authority to the masses (民衆化) and how they tried to co-opt local leaders into their networks (警察化）. But it does not look like there was a rule or a law about mutual policing like the baojia (保甲) system.

It turned out that the collective responsibility system was used in tenant contracts between Japanese agricultural companies (landlords) and Korean peasants, instead. One example was the Chosen kōgyō gaisha, run by the Shibusawa zaibatsu family. A scholar Asada Kyōji describes how the Chosen kōgyō gaisha established the gonin gumi (5-person groups) system and used it as a basic unit of Korean tenant farmers. (Asada Kyōji. 日本帝国主義と旧植民地地主制. 1992. 161). Apparently this was a common custom among the Japanese landholders as the half-governmental Oriental Developmental Company also required five tenant farmers to register together. In Ham Hanhee’s oral interview with a farmer in Cholla Namdo, he said that the most difficult part in getting a contract with the ODC is that “he needed four sponsors who were willing to take on a collective liability for his wrongdoings.” (Hahm Hanhee, Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University 1990. 82)

I wonder if the difference in where this collective liability system belonged somehow reflects the difference in the nature of rule in Taiwan and Korea… just a thought. Another thought is that, if it is possible that the infamous tonarigumi system in Japan during WWII was a product of the experiences of organizing local units in the Japanese colonies… maybe?

Archaeology/English/Historiography/Japan/Premodern/江戸

The Lead Poisoning Thesis

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 1 Comment

Some research is startling, and some research confirms what we already guessed or assumed, but there’s some research which falls between these categories: research which reveals things that should have been obvious, if we’d been thinking about it clearly, or asked the right questions earlier. Siniawer’s argument about the consistency of violence in Imperial Japanese politics falls into that category, as does the new transnational migration scholarship that sees migration as a multi-directional, multi-generational process. I’m sure you have other examples

In the same vein, there’s new archaelogical research from Kitakyushu, announced on LiveScience with the headline “Lead Poisoning in Samurai Kids Linked to Mom’s Makeup.” A study of 70 sets of samurai class remains included several of children:
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General

Goto Shimpei’s Meta Theory on Modern Empire

Posted on by sayaka / 0 Comment

I feel that, from what I have read so far, Goto Shimpei is everyone’s favorite colonial policy-maker. He learned ‘scientific’ colonial governance from Western examples; his management of colonial affairs made the Japanese rule in Taiwan self-sustainable; he made a basis for Japan’s rule of Manchuria. Compared to Hara Kei, another ‘everyone’s favorite’ in the history of Japanese colonialism, who believed in the extension of home rule (内地延長主義), Goto was much closer to contemporary Western colonizers in that he regarded colonies as completely separate entities from the home country. The fact that these two figures who had almost opposite ruling philosophies are praised in the same way shows the difficulty of determining what exactly “good governance” means in colonial rule.

Anyway, I happened to read Goto’s 日本植民政策一班 (Japanese colonial policies), which was written based on his lecture given in 1914. I was curious of how he thought about the role of modern empire. He says;

19世紀において起こりました、国民主義なるものは… 強者には無上の好武器であるが、弱者には却って身を殺すの凶器であったと云ふことは明らかであります…この国民主義の興隆と共にその弱い国は無理往生的に同化を強いられるという形成に相成ったのが、欧羅巴列国生存競争の結果であります。その国民主義に加えるに帝国主義を以てすることになりました。

(rough translation) It is clear that nationalism, which arose in the nineteenth century,… was an excellent weapon for the strong, but for the weak, it was rather a self-destructive weapon… Together with this rise of nationalism, those weak countries were forced to assimilate. This is a result of the competition for survival among European powers. They added imperialism to this nationalism.

Assuming that the common narrative that today’s historians give that the era of nationalism took over the era of imperialism is somewhat right (at least chronologically), Goto’s reverse perception is quite fascinating. Partly this is because he was trying to analyze World War I, which manifested the coexistence of nationalism and imperialism. But I suspect this was a common mindset for the Japanese leaders. They, including Goto, probably felt that “first comes nation, and that becomes empire” from their experience. This was absolutely not the case for most of the European empires. But for Japan, with a strong orientation for “nation” building, “empire” was a powerful version of the “nation.” This might sound a little too banal as a point for Japan specialists, but from a comparative viewpoint, this is quite anomalous.

China/visual culture/War

It's a man's life

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

From Gawker a set of military recruitment ads from around the world. Representing East Asia we have Taiwanese who gain skills while defending 20 million people from an unknown enemy, a Singaporean battleship that transforms into a giant robot, and an ad for the Japanese Navy that is quite remarkable.

(Japanese ad intercut with an American one)

Lots of American military recruitment ads (which turn up a lot on the type of shows my 15-year old son watches) emphasize how joining up connects you to a glorious history, not just the few, the proud, etc. but pictures of the G.I.s who defended freedom by beating Hitler. They tend to avoid pictures defenders of freedom in blue uniforms shooting defenders of slavery in gray, since that brings up some history that they don’t want brought up.

The British ad is maybe the best and most historical. The ad shows as screaming armed black guy (ohh a native) who is calmed by the sheer stiff upper lip  and steely eyes of a British officer. Remember when Britain was an Empire? Well that was before your time, but IF you could be a real British officer that would be something. Beats sitting around Oldham getting pissed, anyway.

In East Asia military history is a very fraught subject. The PLA has killed lots of people, but many of them were Chinese. Even stirring up anti-Japanese feelings (or even bringing up the Revolution) may not be a good idea.

The Japanese Navy of course also has a glorious history, if one assumes that for a Navy a glorious history means sending lots of foreigners to watery graves. Needless to say they don’t want to emphasize that. Maybe a dance routine is best.

Here is a PRC version. Comparing ads you might think Taiwan and Chinese Beijing were the same country.

Via Tapped

Books and Articles/English/Foreign Views/globalization/Japan/martial arts/Popular Culture/江戸

Young Samurai: The Way of the Sword: Ancient Culture, Modern Politics

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

Reading The Way of the Sword while listening to the “Restoring Honor” event, I began to wonder if our current shift to discourses of honor and warriors is a side effect of the ubiquity of martial arts in the US over the last 35 years. The values of martial arts, even the most modern ones, include personal and collective honor in ways that were, for a long time, rather absent in most American rhetoric. Sarah Palin said “If you look for the virtues that have sustained our country, you will find them in those who wear the uniform, who take the oath, who pay the price for our freedom.” That’s as good a paraphrase of the Imperial Rescript for Soldiers and Sailors as I’ve ever heard from an American politician.

The cultural and historical problems which made Young Samurai: The Way of the Warrior such a weak hash of Harry Potter plotting and dojo delusions persist in the second book of the trilogy. Like the first volume, it’s a quick read, probably most suitable for middle school/junior high readers, though older readers with an interest in the martial arts won’t find it childish. Historians of Japan, however, will find this gaijin-boy-in-early-Edo tale a test of character not unlike the one the protagonist faces: to get through it, you must ignore exhaustion, overcome moments of sharp pain, focus on the goal, and achieve a state of no-mind…. [spoilers ahead, of course, though the fact that it’s the middle part of a trilogy probably tells you most of what you need to know.]
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