Books and Articles/Cultural/English/Foreign Views/Historiography/Japan/martial arts/Memory/US-Japan/江戸

Judge Ooka’s Sidekick, part two: The Ghost In the Tokaido Inn and In Darkness, Death

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 1 Comment

After reading the last two installments in the Hooblers’ samurai detective series, I got hold of the first two. There are still two I have not read, obviously, but based on these four, I can’t seriously recommend the series: the misinformation and errors just outweigh any value that they have as presentations of Edo life or culture.1 The authors’ notes can’t save these books, because even good information is twisted into such blazingly implausible scenarios that no real understanding could survive, and there’s no end to the errors. [Spoilers, of course, because I don’t really want anyone to read these books!]
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  1. I still maintain that the last book, A Samurai Never Fears Death is decent, but it’s clearly the exception.  ↩

bibliography/China/English/Web Sites and Resources

JOURNAL WATCH: H-DIPLO JOURNAL AND PERIODICAL REVIEW

Posted on by C. W. Hayford / 0 Comment

A major problem nowadays is to somehow find that newly published article in a journal you don’t subscribe to – I miss enough articles in the journals I do subscribe to.

The first resort is the Bibliography of Asian Studies Online, only available by subscription (individuals can subscribe but it’s mostly libraries). BAS categorizes hundreds of thousands of journal articles and chapters in edited volumes going back to 1971. The search makes is easy to find an article if you know what you are looking for.  Good enough.

But it’s harder to come across what you weren’t looking for. The most fun way of dealing with the problem is simple: if you have access to a good library’s journal room, stroll up and down the aisles browsing like a deer for acorns. This is good for at least an afternoon and it gets you out of your office but it’s far from systematic and many of us don’t have that access.

So I have been happy in a major way that H-DIPLO has stepped in to organize Journal Watch: H-Diplo Journal & Periodical Review.

The self-description is “H-Diplo Journal Watch monitors leading scholarly journals for articles of particular interest to scholars of diplomacy, foreign relations, and international history, which are listed below by journal title.” Each quarter they post a  .pdf file with Tables of Contents for every journal you ever heard of in those fields, or at least the ones in English.  You can either browse or search for your words. Coverage begins with the year 2007.

Putting this together can’t be much fun, so kudos goes to our new heroes, Erin Black, editor for journal titles from A-I, and Lubna Qureshi, editor for journal titles from J-Z.

Journal Watch doesn’t solve the problem – there’s just too much coming out and there’s no way to search by key words or topic. But every competent project like this is a big help, and you are sure to find acorns which you would have missed.

General

Self-Introduction: Kate McDonald

Posted on by kate / 3 Comments

Hi everybody. My name is Kate McDonald, and I’m the newest contributor to Frog in a Well. I’m currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Japanese History at the University of California, San Diego. My research focuses on travel and tourism in East Asia in the 1920s and 1930s, specifically Japanese and foreign travel to Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria. I am also interested in the histories of mobility and technology.

Thanks to Konrad for inviting me to join the group. I look forward to our discussions!

China/Language/Sino-Japanese Wars

Sweaty Traitors – Character Simplifications That Just Weren't Meant to Be

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 8 Comments

I had an old instructor of Chinese language many years ago who took every opportunity to pick fun at the evil Reds on the mainland. I think he fled China in 1949 and never got over it. He loved to pick on their character simplification, saying things like, “Only the Communists would take the heart out of love.” (愛 -> 爱) Or, referring to the wings represented in the character 習 for “to learn; study” – and how this nicely gave us the image of taking flight, he would say, “Ask the Communists how you can fly with only one wing!” (習 -> 习)

I always thought his complaints were humorous but unfair, simplification will always result in such changes, and many (most?) were adopted from existing simplifications used widely in handwriting. The KMT dabbled with simplification as well, even if it never worked out. There are many fans of the simplification process and while I personally find simplified characters downright ugly to look at by comparison, I can’t really explain how I came to this aesthetic conclusion. Perhaps the old teacher brain-washed me, or the fewer simplifications of Japanese, which I studied first, made their mark?

Some simplifications already in circulation before the first round of the Chinese government mandated simplification in the mid 1950s, however, didn’t make the cut.

One that I have come across in the past couple of years and seen used in a wide range of hand written (or etched) documents of the Communist party is the simplification of the character for “Han” (漢) as in the Han people or more generally, Chinese, into the character 汗, which normally means “sweat” instead of the character which was ultimately chosen as the standard for simplified Chinese, 汉.

At one point I thought this might only be the case in documents which were “etched” in the age of pre-photocopy copies, where making curved lines is more difficult, but I have seen the same document use two of the three variations, 漢, 汗, and 汉.

I notice this more often than one might in my documents from the 1930s and 1940s since I study the punishment of traitors, or hanjian (漢奸). This word often appears in my documents as 汗奸. When I first saw it, I did a double take, wondering what horrible sins had been committed by the “sweaty traitors.”

Find the sweaty traitors in examples below the fold all taken from Public Security Bureau or more specifically “treason elimination” reports from 1939-1947 (some have a sweaty traitor, some have both regular and sweaty traitors, and one has the more common simplification):
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Korea/Korea-China/Korean War

An Interpreter’s Tale

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 7 Comments

I have been collecting notes for a study of the treason of interpreters. This may not make it into my dissertation, but I find the topic fascinating. In the history of collaboration, interpreters often figure prominently. They speak for the occupier, they ask questions for him, they feed him the information he needs to establish and maintain power. They usually come to their position by virtue of their language abilities, but very often such abilities are the product of a long and deep intimacy with the culture and people of the occupier, either through prolonged residence or study in the occupier’s country, personal relationships, or a hybrid identity.

I'm Just the Interpreter

A Classic Image of the Treasonous Interpreter

(From the Military Museum of the Chinese People’s Revolution in Beijing)

These treasonous interpreters are often portrayed as the quintessential running dogs of the enemy, groveling selfish figures standing just behind their master who sell out their nation for whatever benefits might come their way. It is not surprising, then, to find them a major target of attack by insurgents. Interpreters for the Israelis in Gaza, for the Americans in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, for the Japanese in China and Korea, indeed everywhere, including hated German-Norwegians who interpreted for the German occupation in my own hometown in Stavanger, are often tried as traitors in the aftermath of a conflict, but are also frequently the victims of brutal assassinations and torture by forces of the resistance.

Of course, the language skills of these interpreters are not necessarily indicative of their sympathy for the enemy. Like any other collaborator who freely chooses or are, to various degrees, coerced into working for the occupation, these interpreters often merely see themselves as continuing their trade, or making use of suddenly useful skill. I think this observation can cut both ways: their constant visual proximity and ability to speak for the invader has led to a demonization of interpreters that is well out of proportion to their crime, when seen as a kind of trade of services for the enemy (as opposed to helping them run puppet regimes, for example, or carry out acts of violence on their behalf). On the other hand, as with everyone else whose continued provision of the services of labor and goods to an occupier or other enemy in wartime enable it to maintain its power, the consequences have moral implications.1 Now let us look at one case that offers what I think is a rather typical case of the most common twists and turns in the career of a treasonous interpreter.

Kim Yong Hyun

The recent anniversary of the opening of the most violent stage of the Korean civil war on June 25, 1950, when North Korea launched a full invasion of the south, found me in the National Library in Taiwan. Organizing some of my notes on North Korea there, I got distracted reading the memoir of a Korean interpreter Kim Yong Hyun.2

Kim, who spoke good English, served the US forces for a time as an interpreter for the 2nd infantry division. Then, captured by Chinese forces he eventually found himself face to face with an aggressive North Korean soldier in an interaction that could have gone much worse for him than it did.

In his answers to the queries of the North Korean, we learn that Kim had attended middle school in Japan, leaving Hiroshima only a year before the city was destroyed. His association with Japan is not something a suspect person would want to carry about given the risk of being called a pro-Japanese traitor, but as we will see, even North Korean officers could have a Japanese higher education in their past. Kim trained to become a teacher, which is a career that always risks putting him among the class of the intellectual bourgeoisie. Finally, he fled North Korea, moving to the south in February 1946. This, the North Korean informed him, made him a “traitor” and a “running dog.”

This is true, in legal terms, as North Korean law made fleeing to South Korea a treasonous crime until 1999, when a distinction was made between migrants and treasonous defectors.3 While technically, Kim could have been shot for this treason, at least at this early stage, North Korea seems to have been going relatively easy on those who “illegally crossed the border” (불법월경) or “guiding someone across the border (월경안내). In trial records found in captured North Korean documents in the National Archives in Washington DC, it seems the going rate for such a crime was 1-3 years.4 Add to this the fact that Kim had worked for the Americans, and he found himself to be a real “American running dog.” Fortunately for Kim, he claims the Chinese military refused to hand him over to his North Korean accuser.5

Despite his anti-communist tone, Kim has glowing praise for the Chinese soldiers who kept him in captivity. This is consistent with much I have seen out there on the unusually benevolent Communist Chinese policy towards prisoners (though there are important exceptions and they often lacked supplies to fully feed them. Read more in these two postings.), whether they were Japanese or Americans. They, “never gave us any harsh lectures on ideological issues. They didn’t bother our prisoners in any way.”6 That same night Kim found himself in a position that I think is the key dilemma for talented multi-linguals in a wartime or occupation situation. Called over by a Chinese officer, Kim would be offered a proposition he would have been either extremely courageous or foolish to turn down:

“Comrade,” the [Korean-Chinese] interpreter began, “Would you be kind enough to interpret in English for us.

I nodded. They ushered in an American prisoner. I recognized him instantly because he was from my own outfit – a full sergeant who was one of our platoon leaders. We nodded in mutual agreement.”7

After this first job for the Chinese, he was asked to become a regular interpreter for the Chinese, translating Americans who were being interrogated by their Chinese captors. He accepted,

Well, what can I say? The offer was too good to refuse. My instinct to survive dominated my mind at that moment. “I would be happy to oblige.”

Kim would receive good food and treatment for his work but he was at once placed in a new position as a “running dog” for the Chinese. Later he served North Koreans more directly, a camp commandant, again translating during an interrogation of an American soldier and, moreover, asked to pretend he was a North Korean officer despite continuing to wear an American uniform while in captivity.8

In an amazingly frank exchange, if true, between this prisoner and the North Korean commandant, the latter said he was a college student in Japan during the war, when he was conscripted into the Japanese military. He was eventually captured by American forces in the Philippines who, despite the Japanese propaganda suggesting otherwise, he found to be “very civilized.”9 After returning to Korea he was a professor for a time but moved north to see the workings of Communism himself. Here was a Japanese trained North Korean camp commandant in charge of the imprisonment and interrogation of American forces, which he had once himself been a prisoner of.

The story that follows traces the escape of Kim from North Korea, or rather, his return to Seoul as a “Liberated UN soldier” and his escape thereafter across the lines. He returns to work as an interpreter for the Americans, serving as a G-2 officer and interpreter under a colonel in the 73rd Heavy Tank Battalion.10

As with all memoirs, especially those which contain whole dialogues between the author and people that are based on conversations many decades earlier, the source must be treated with great care. A very familiar, at least to me, picture emerges, however: Kim memoir is a world in which characters are divided roughly between those who are “hard-core” communists, thus blinded by ideology, and the more mixed up humane characters who are just trying to get by. It is a world where collaborators survive and live on, where the Viktor Komarovskies (from Dr. Zhivago) are not the villains.11 You can almost hear that great quote by Komarovsky in the film:

There are two kinds of men, and only two, and that young man is one kind. He is high-minded. He is pure. He is the kind of man that the world pretends to look up to and in fact despises. … There’s another kind. Not high-minded, not pure, but alive.12

Update: Charles Montgomery over at Korean Modern Literature in Translation was kind enough to mention this post here and says it reminds him of a passage in a work by Kim Yong-Ik. The quote is so apt for the discussion here:

“Eating greedily he looked curiously at my concise English-Korean dictionary on the shelf. ‘The language of an occupying army is a meal ticket, you know.’ He smiled faintly” (Kim, Home Again (1945) 27).

  1. I don’t think I have ever gone into much detail on my own views of this, but to sum up my position when it comes to the “treasonous” nature of such acts: I don’t have a problem with calling things treason when they are, but for me, treason is never, by itself, morally objectionable. This should be kept in mind whenever I raise related issues here at Frog in a Well.  ↩

  2. Yong Hyun Kim, Susanne Kim Nelson ed. Into the Vortex of War: A Korean Interpreter’s Close Encounter with the Enemy. (AuthorHouse, 2008)  ↩

  3. As of the major 1975 revision, it was covered in the section for “counter-revolutionary crimes” in articles 52 or 53 of the criminal law, which apparently states that fleeing to a foreign country is punishable by death and confiscation of all property. Institute of North Korean Studies. North Korea’s Criminal Law (1991). In Sup Han has a discussion of the recent changes to this law over time, In Sup Han “The 2004 Revision of Criminal Law in North Korea: — a take-off?” Santa Clara Journal of International Law 1 (2006), 130.  ↩

  4. See RG242 SA 2005 6/43. By contrast, a case of “Reactionary attempted rape” (反動 強姦未遂) I saw there got 1 year and 6 months.  ↩

  5. Yong Hyun Kim Into the Vortex of War: A Korean Interpreter’s Close Encounter with the Enemy (Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2008), 46-48.  ↩

  6. Ibid., 48.  ↩

  7. Ibid., 48.  ↩

  8. Ibid., 56.  ↩

  9. Ibid., 60.  ↩

  10. Ibid., 82  ↩

  11. Of course, those familiar with Korean literature need not look to Viktor Komarovsky or the Good Soldier Švejk. Reading Kim’s memoir I was reminded of the fantastic character of Kapitan Ri (꺼삐딴 리) in the short story of that name by Chŏn Kwangyong, who managed to survive under Japanese, Soviet, and US regimes.  ↩

  12. Is it in the written version as well? It has to be one of my absolute favorite lines.  ↩

Books/China/Classics/English/Qin-Han

Huainanzi

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 6 Comments

Columbia University Press is publishing a complete translation of the Huainanzi, a Han-dynasty compendium of philosophy and statecraft which has been of great interest to scholars for many years but is only now receiving a full English translation

We are lucky enough to have John Major, one of the translators here for a guest post on the process of translation and also to answer a few questions.

In March of this year Columbia University Press published The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early Han China, a translation of a classic work of early Chinese philosophy written under the general editorship of Liu An, King of Huainan, and presented to the Han imperial throne in 139 BCE. My colleagues and I in the translation team hope and expect that this first-ever translation of The Huainanzi into English will make an important contribution to the study of Chinese intellectual history by opening a fascinating window into currents of thought in the early Han dynasty.

The process of translating this massive and challenging work may be of interest.

In about 1994 I mentioned to my friend Hal Roth (Harold D. Roth, Brown University) that I was thinking of doing a full Huainanzi translation, and he replied that he was thinking of doing the same. So we decided to join forces; that’s how the project got started. Both of us had already devoted large amounts of our professional attention to the Huainanzi. We believed that it was under-appreciated in the field of early China studies; everyone in the field knew of Liu An’s great work and perhaps consulted it for comparative purposes when working on other texts, but few people at that time had made The Huainanzi the focus of their research. It was the last really major work of Chinese philosophy from the early imperial period that still lacked a complete English translation. (A Paris-based group beat us to the distinction of publishing the first Western-language translation; their French translation was published in 2002.)

We landed a Chiang Ching-kuo fellowship to begin the work in 1996-98. Jay Sailey, an independent scholar who also had a longstanding interest in The Huainanzi was initially part of the project but later dropped out; a few years into the project two additional participants came on board. The final team consisted of John Major, Sarah Queen (Connecticut College), Andrew Meyer (Brooklyn College) and Hal Roth. Michael Puett (Harvard) participated in the translation of chapter 13, and Judson Murray (Wright State U.) participated in the translation of chapter 21. But the core team was the four of us.

The project took so long — about fifteen years — partly because the text is quite large (the published translation runs to just over 1000 pages) and also quite difficult (it is in standard Classical Chinese but there are many textual issues to deal with and some of the language and the technical terminology is far from transparent). Also all of the participants had other ongoing obligations; it was never possible for everyone on the team to work on the project full-time, all the time. The last three years or so were very intense and we all basically put aside as much as possible of our other research and writing to concentrate on the Huainanzi, but even so, there were courses to prepare and teach, administrative work to be done, other research and writing commitments to honor, and so on. But we were determined to work as a team rather than simply dividing up and parceling out the work (as the French group had done); we were convinced that approaching the text in a truly collaborative fashion was the key to making the translation as accurate and graceful as possible. The procedure that we adopted was complicated. We began by dividing up responsibility for doing first-draft translations of all of the 21 chapters. Then each draft was read and critiqued by all other members of the team, revised, read and critiqued again, and further revised. The aim was to make the final versions as complete, accurate, and seamless as possible, no matter who did the initial draft. From 1998 to 2009 we met for four or five very hard-working weekends per year at Brown to hash out difficult passages and discuss, for example, uniform ways of translating important terms. The last stage of translation consisted of reading the entire work aloud — taking turns, one person would read while the other three followed along in the classical Chinese text, looking for errors. That took many, many hours, but it proved to be extremely worthwhile.

Manuscript preparation itself was a big job that took about two years: peer review, revision; copy-editing, more revision; page proofs, corrections; appendices, index, etc. It was a huge undertaking just in the physical sense; the final typescript ran to over 1600 double-spaced pages.

Working as a team was really essential to the project; it was a much more complicated way of doing the task than a solo effort might have been, but the result is much better than any of us could have done alone. Intensive, long-term collaborative work is quite common in the natural sciences but relatively rare in other fields; I think that the success of this project demonstrates the merits of such close collaboration in the humanities despite its complexity and the hard work required to implement it.

The Huainanzi is full of fascinating material, and the effort of translating it was more than repaid by the intellectual challenge of doing the work and the satisfaction of having it turn out well. And we are delighted with the actual published volume, which was extremely handsomely produced by Columbia University Press. It is gratifying that the first printing sold out within three months, and the book is already in its second printing. It is very satisfying to have this work finally out in the world.

John S. Major

China/China-Russia/Communism/Maoist era (1949-1976)

The Most Effective Kind of Education

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 1 Comment

While there are many historical problems worthy of exploring in the study of history, I personably believe that one of the most important is an attempt to understand the process by which humans come to accept violence as legitimate. History has no monopoly on this, it is a deeply interdisciplinary issue. A second related, and equally interdisciplinary issue is to better understand the many different reasons why someone comes to accept some or all of the claims made by the institutions of power. This too, as a question of trust, is ultimately tied to legitimacy.

Like most movements aspiring to power, the Communist Party of China was also deeply interested in these questions, especially, of course, the latter. In looking through internal reports of the Treason Elimination Department (锄奸部) in Shandong from the 1930s and 1940s, I am fascinated by their emphasis on measuring and reporting not merely the elimination of the treason in question, but in the response to that elimination by the people. How did the masses respond? How many people were “mobilized” (发动) by public trial x or execution y?

I recently came across yet another source which has helped me think about, and continue to be puzzled about the two issues I opened with.

Last week I read the memoir of Sam Ginsbourg, a Russian Jew born in Siberia, but raised in Harbin, Vladivostok, and Shanghai. I’m mostly interested in Ginsbourg as a source of background information on his older brother Mark Gayn (Mark changed his name after moving to the United States), one of the most important journalists and first hand sources reporting on the complex political events of occupation Japan and Korea in the early aftermath of World War II.

Though I may post more on Mark some other time, Sam is also a very interesting figure. In 1947, as the Chinese Civil war was heating up, he travelled from Shanghai to Communist occupied Yantai (Chefoo), in Shandong province. He became a passionate supporter of Communism and a Chinese citizen in 1953. Ginsbourg took up a career in Shandong as a professor of Russian language and, whenever his card was up in political movements, as a bourgeois intellectual or Russian spy.

At least half of his memoir My First Sixty Years in China, published in 1982, deals with the long history of Communist political movements he experienced. In most cases, and especially during the Cultural Revolution, Ginsbourg found himself among the targets for attack. His own suffering and the ridiculousness of the accusations made against him and some of those close to him are described, albeit in a somewhat muted tone. Although I only skimmed through some of his encounters, it appears that he didn’t fare too badly. He wasn’t killed, and he doesn’t seem to have been severely beaten or subjected to long periods in labor camps. “On the whole,” he says, “the movements were a necessary political and ideological foundation for rapid economic growth.”1

His closing chapter is set up as a response to a visiting American academic who tries to get him to express regret for having moved to the liberated areas in 1947 and stayed through the tumultuous decades that followed. I am not too surprised to see him defend his home, his friends, and his entire way of life in those pages, rejecting the outsider’s arrogance and looking forward with great optimism at the future. All that was missing were the cute baby chickens shown in final scene of the movie To Live (活着).

More jarring however, was Ginsbourg’s display of that characteristic disconnect between what Ginsbourg himself experienced, and acts of violence he witnessed against those he did not know personally. Whereas he knows he was not himself a Russian spy, and that the President of Shandong University was probably not guilty of the many reactionary crimes he was accused of when he was purged, he doesn’t seem able to extend the same sort of skepticism to many other cases.

We see this when he describes a realization he has as he watched, in 1950, two “reactionaries” being delivered to the execution ground.

I reflected with satisfaction how far I had come since the autumn of 1947, when I had felt shock at the sight of a woman landlord being dragged to execution. Not an iota of pity or perturbation stirred me in 1950. I felt nothing but hatred for the two who were in the truck.”2

Later at Qingdao stadium (From Brazzaville to Kabul, from Pyongyang to Kigali, stadiums serve well for executions when you want to maximize impact) with, he claims, 50,000 in attendance, he watched the trial of two “ringleaders” of a secret religious society.

The woman – the abbess of a monastery – had caused the death of several ‘believers’, cheating hundreds of others of large sums of money and committed other crimes. The old man had raped sixty nuns of his nunnery, some of whom had died.

After the trial the two of them were led, or rather dragged, around the track of the stadium for everybody to see. As they rounded the huge arena, a roar of shouts followed them until they were hauled onto trucks and driven off.

The movement taught me and, I believe, others – who like myself had been born and had grown up in towns, especially those coming from well-to-do families – how horrible were the crimes that had been committed and were still being committed against the common people, how deep was the popular hatred toward the evildoers and how just the deserts. It was the best, the most practical, the most effective kind of education; and I have always thought myself lucky to have gone through it.3

Is it possible the two “ringleaders” were in fact murderers and rapists? It is certainly possible. For example, my own reading of reports from the period suggests that the Party often capitalized on the huge anger felt by local villagers against an infamous bandit or local puppet military commander. Punishing real evildoers is not just good justice, it is good politics. And yet it is just as possible that, like so many thousands of victims of the campaigns against religious organizations and secret societies in the late 1940s and early 1950s, these two leaders of religious societies had committed only the crime of leading an organization targeted by the party for complete liquidation or full co-optation. Accusing the leaders of outlandish and horrific crimes is the fastest way to demoralize and discredit such an organization, setting into motion a wave of self-criticisms and struggle sessions for other members who might then emerge cleansed of their crime of association – at least until the next movement needed a target.

Writing his memoir towards the end of his long life in China, Sam Ginsbourg wrote about that encounter and his realization at that moment without adding a word of doubt or reflection from the perspective of someone who had been a far more fortunate victim of criminal accusations. It seems that, indeed, it was a most effective kind of education.

  1. Sam Ginsbourg, My First Sixty Years in China (Beijing: Foreign Language Press Beijing, 1982), 247.  ↩

  2. Ibid., 209.  ↩

  3. Ibid., 210.  ↩

General/Korea

A Chinese Warlord’s Predictions for the Korean War

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 2 Comments

Yan Xishan, former warlord of Shanxi province and briefly premier of the Chinese republic wrote a book, Peace or World War, that was published in its English translation in December, 1950, but appears to have been written not long before the North Korean invasion around or before May, 1950.1 In the work we see an early version of Yan’s dream for world unity and a cosmopolitan future built on his own unusual anti-communist and anti-capitalist confucian utopianism, which I’ll hopefully be presenting on at a conference later this year.2 He would spend the last decade of his life in retirement developing these ideas and writing books and pamphlets on the subject.

Coming fresh from his own battles and defeat at the hands of Communists in Shanxi and later elsewhere in China, there is an interesting moment in the book where Yen makes his predictions for a coming war on the Korean peninsula during discussion of the prospects for a third world war. In this brief section focusing on Korea, he predicts both Chinese aid to North Korea, a potentially fast occupation of south Korea, and the quality of North Korean troops hardened by their participation in the Chinese civil war:

Now, let us compare North Korea and South Korea. The power of the latter, even with American training, is but half that of the former. Moreover, the South Korean troops have been trained to fight in orthodox manner while it is difficult to say what type of fighting technique the North Koreans will employ. Besides, about twenty thousand North Korean soldiers were known to be in Communist China and they probably returned to their own country before the outbreak of war. It is reported that when North Korea attacks South Korea, Communist China will, in order to return the service of the North Koreans on the mainland, supply them with a hundred thousand Chinese soldiers. This information, although unconfirmed, is rather logical. If it is true, the force of North Korea will amount to four hundred thousand and will be several times that of South Korea. As to the air force, the North Koreans hold a vast superiority over the South Koreans. Furthermore, the Communists, infiltrating the south will make every effort to stir up the South Koreans. This is a great crisis for South Korea. But, being a newly established country, it naturally should strengthen her army, reform her administration, and launch a movement to defend herself. In this movement, she should arm her people, clear out the Communists within the country, and reform the Communist sympathizers so that the administration, the military and the people would be united for national defense.

The population of South Korea is seventeen million people, of which one fourth are young men and one fourth are young women. After organizing them with special training, eight million men and women would be able to render their services in any war effort. Thus, she will not be afraid of any attack from North Korea which has a population of only eight million. Not only can South Korea find security, but the anti-aggression-countries, after the outbreak of the Third World War, will also be able to make use of her bases. Otherwise, because of the present situation, North Korea will be superior to South Korea in all respects. The latter will very possible [sic] be occupied by the former within one month after the outbreak of war, if there is no substantial American military aid.3

  1. The preface is dated May of that year.  ↩

  2. This is part of research I have been doing on early postwar utopian and world federalist schemes in East Asia. As with other presentations, I’ll post my conference paper, “Utopians in Defeat” on Yan Xishan and Ishiwara Kanji’s early postwar theories of world unity at muninn.net when it is done.  ↩

  3. Yen Hsi-Shan,Peace or World War trans. Yang Su-yen (Taipei: Publisher unknown, 1950), 34-36. Yan’s population estimates seem a bit off to me. Some of my notes mention 20 million for the south and just under 10 for the north in 1950 but I haven’t looked up the most recent estimates for the period. He also seems to overestimate North Korean military strength though the ration of 2:1 against the south isn’t too far off. ↩

Books and Articles/Foreign Views/Historiography/Japan/US-Japan/江戸

Judge Ooka’s Sidekick: A Samurai Never Fears Death and The Sword that Cut the Burning Grass by Dorothy & Thomas Hoobler

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

Wandering through the children’s section of our local public library with my son, I encountered a new-to-me children’s mystery series based in Tokugawa Japan. The books are by Dorothy and Thomas Hobbler, and are piggybacking on the Judge Ooka character. Unlike certain other Japan-based anglophone fictions, these feature a cast of entirely Japanese characters, though the protagonist is still young and enough of a fish-out-of-water to justify significant exposition. The “Authors Note” in the back of each book briefly lays out the historical and cultural foundations of the story, and clearly notes which elements are “completely from the imagination of the authors.” (Sword, 210) Though I noted some anachronisms and some larger issues, on the whole these were surprisingly good in both detail and theme.

The books are the adventures of Seikei, an Osaka-born merchant class boy who is adopted as the son and heir of Judge Ooka in the 1730s. That kind of adoption was relatively rare, but well within contemporary norms, and the unusual nature of class-jumping adoption is fairly well integrated into the stories. The characters are a bit flat and the issues broadly drawn, but that’s not unusual for children’s fiction; more importantly, they are some of the most genuinely and humanely Japanese characters I’ve encountered in my sojourns into this literature. [Spoilers follow, of course]
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Academia/Blog Carnival/Conferences/English/General/Japan

Blogging and Events

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 1 Comment

I am in Portland, at ASPAC 2010, and having my usual conference fun. It’s a pretty full schedule, so I’m not going to try to blog during, but I’ll get some blogging in after, and mostly here because I’m mostly doing Japan panels this year. However, I am experimenting with using laptop and iPad as notetaking devices1 — I’ve always used paper before — and PSU has good wireless service, so I’m also posting notes on twitter as time and attention allow. If you’re on twitter and have a question about anything I’ve tweeted, feel free to contact me that way.

Also, I’ll be hosting the July History Carnival at my World History teaching blog (have to give it something to do over the summer!), so send me history-related posts via comment here, via email (jonathan@froginawell.net), through the History Carnival submission page, or via twitter (through @jondresner or using the #hc89 tag).

  1. I haven’t decided which one I like better. I’m more used to the laptop, of course, but the iPad has a huge advantage in portability and battery life. The fact that it’s slightly harder to use, both in terms of typing and multitasking, seems to make the iPad a bit better for concentrating on what’s happening, oddly enough. I’m going to keep switching between them as the conference goes on, to see if I come to any firmer conclusions, and also to get more practice on the iPad, which is a new tool/toy.  ↩

China/English/Maoist era (1949-1976)/Post-Mao/Public History/Republican/Sino-Japanese Wars/War

Private views of Chinese history

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 3 Comments

Recently I went to the Jianchuan museums, which are in Anren, just outside Chengdu. It is an interesting place first because it is huge, financed by mogul Fan Jianchuan, and second because it is a private museum, something not very common in China.

The place is covers a lot of ground, and there are, or soon will be buildings showcasing West Sichuan folk customs, footbinding, traditional houses, and the response to the Wenchuan earthquake of 2008. They are already working on the building for the last of these, and some of the artifacts are sitting outside.

The biggest and most interesting sections are on the War with Japan and the Red Years.

The War buildings (there are several) are strongly nationalistic (it is glorious to die for the homeland, etc) and pretty popular with the Chinese visitors. The war also gets some of the most striking installations, including a display of the handprints of 300 veterans and statues of 200 heroes of the war (mostly generals and commanders of various sorts.)

Both of them sort of reminded me of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, in that they rely on the effect of masses of individuals (each of the handprints and statues has an inscription telling you who it is.) The statues also remind me somewhat of Qin Shihuang’s terracotta warriors, although having been given names and not being in such strict ranks they are more individualized.1

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  1. Also, like Qin Shihuang himself, they are on top of a relief map of China. ↩

Colonial/Cultural/Gender/General/Korea/Korean

Thinking about the Japanese woman in Korean-Japanese (内鮮一体) couples

Posted on by sayaka / 5 Comments

When I was preparing for my oral exams last semester, the professors who do not work on East Asia (I had a European historian and a Latin American historian in my committee) were always fascinated by the nature of “inter-racial marriage” in the Japanese empire. Both in the history of childhood and youth and the history of modern empire, the most complex and flexible interpretations of “race” happened on the ground where colonial societies had no choice but face the existence of inter-racial sexuality and mixed children. In the Japanese empire, inter-racial marriage was not problematized in the same way as it was in European empires. For example, in two articles of roundtable discussion on marriage (結婚改善座談会) published in Korean Social Work (朝鮮社会事業 – yes I still love this journal) in May and June 1935, the participants, mostly Japanese bureaucrats and educators in Seoul, never discuss problems of inter-marriage. The central problem was rather an increasing number of old single women in Korea. Their presentation of statistics of the marriage success rate among graduates of the elementary school bears much resemblance to today’s discussion of unemployment rates. They agree this is a problem that “kyoka dantai (moral suasion groups)” should become involved in. Another major issue brought up during this roundtable is, of course, the ways in which people conduct wedding ceremonies. For the participants, excessively luxurious wedding ceremonies often exhaust village economies. The venue of wedding ceremonies was also discussed — e.g. whether it was appropriate to imitate Taisho Emperor and to use the Chōsen Shrine for ordinary people’s wedding.

The lack of discussion on inter-racial marriage by contemporary experts is not the only interesting feature to note. “It is an open secret among Korean scholars,” one professor of modern Korean history said to me the other day, “that there were a significant number of married couples between Korean men and Japanese women but there is so little study on it.” This is another surprise to non-East Asian historians. In other places it is men from the colonizing countries and women from colonized societies that married, and this feminization of colonies is often regarded as an aspect of Orientalism. There were, of course, married couples between Korean women and Japanese men, but as Oguma Eiji has already pointed out, the Government-General in Korea encouraged Japanese women to marry Korean men because, they thought, Japanese mothers were supposed to build the foundations of Japanese culture in the home.

How do you define “coloniality” in this relationship represented by couples of Korean men and Japanese women? To offer my half-baked thought first, we really need to re-think how the ‘Japanese woman’ was interpreted in relation to modernity. I cannot easily connect this to the discussion of coloniality — or assure that it is a useful concept here.

One chapter in Nam Pujin (南富鎭)’s book 文学の植民地主義 (Colonialism in Literature) deals with the issue of colonialism in love and marriage affairs. He introduces a number of Korean writers who wrote stories in which a Korean man dreamed of marrying a Japanese woman, a Korean couple who pretended as if they had been a Korean-Japanese couple, a Japanese woman who marries a Korean man, and mixed children who grew up hating their Korean origins owing to the social discriminations they received, and so on. Nam recognizes some “coloniality” in that it is usually Koreans who have to “confess” their origin, and will come to be “understood” by their Japanese partners even in recent love stories. His discussion of the novels from the 20s and 30s is more thought-provoking. Nam points out that “Naisen kekkon (Korean-Japanese marriage) was consistently the most trendy topic for literature, and despite its political nature, it was the most popular fantasy and hope to overcome obstacles that the state and ethnicity impose on one’s love and marriage” (27). We cannot say that Naisen kekkon was as prevalent among Korean masses as Korean writers and intellectuals experienced, but it seems to me that discussion of such marriages could appear fresh and even rebellious in a way that was not necessarily directed against the Japanese colonial government, but against older generations or elite Korean families.

Nam Pujin also presents a convincing argument that Japanese women represented ‘modernity’ in the eyes of Korean masses. This itself is an interesting and anomalous case from a comparative perspective. But at the same time, the story is not simply a reverse sexual representation of imperial modernity. Japanese women represented much more than that. What caught my attention was Nam’s description of a novel called 処女の倫理 (Ethics of the Virgin) written by a well-known Korean writer Chang Hyakchu 張 赫宙 in 1939. In this novel, an independent-minded Japanese woman fell in love with and married a Korean man, but was betrayed by him because he had an official Korean wife, and was discriminated against within Korean society. According to Nam, “double marriage” was quite common since many Korean intellectuals either abandoned or ignored their official wives whom they were forced to marry at younger age, and had love affairs with Japanese women. However strongly Korean men desired a Japanese woman as if it would symbolize an achievement of modernity, this particular novel depicted very unstable power relationships that could be caused as a consequence of such a phenomenon.

There is another piece of evidence on the complexity of the issue that I found in the roundtable article mentioned above. Mōri (a commissioner to the Government-General in Korea) says, “Ladies who were raised in Korea face difficulty in finding a marriage partner.” It soon becomes clear that he is referring to Japanese women who grew up in Korea. The first reason he gives is “women who grew up in Korea are too used to luxury and cannot even sew a Kimono. Those who grew up in Japanese (naichi) rural areas are pretty good at this.” According to Mōri, Japanese men preferred naichi women who were not as “modernized” as those who grew up in Korea. It makes sense that Japanese officials and business people who were dispatched to Korea received extra salaries and benefits, and their children regarded themselves as upper-class in comparison to both the average Japanese and Korean families. Does this mean what “the real Japanese woman” represented differed significantly for Korean writers and for Japanese men?

Given the resulting mess, I cannot pin down who colonized whom or even how we could know of it in this issue of Korean-Japanese marriage.

China/English

Cities and Nationalisms Conference

Posted on by katrina / 0 Comment

This conference will take place in London on 17-18 June 2010.

“Cities have been intimately connected with nationalisms of many kinds. The architecture and spatial design of cities have commonly been intended to bolster national pride. So have the nationalist ceremonies that cities have staged. Yet cities have also been places of contending nationalisms or counter nationalisms in which urban territorial divides have helped shape and maintain competing or actively hostile group loyalties. Cities have also sometimes promoted themselves as cosmopolitan and hospitable to all nations. This conference aims to explore the nature and rich variety of connections between nationalisms and cities in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Cities explored include Alexandria, Belfast, Buenos Aires, Budapest, Cape Town, Cork, Cracow, Hong Kong, Kinshasa, Kirkuk, London, Montreal, Paris, Prague, Shanghai, Tel Aviv and Washington.

Speakers include: Robert Bickers (Bristol), Iain Black (Cambridge), Bill Freund (Kwa-Zulu Natal), Tim Harper (Cambridge), Paul-André Linteau (Québec) and Prashant Kidambi (Leicester)”

The conference does have some Asian focus, and I will be chairing the panel on Chinese cities.

More information here http://www.history.ac.uk/events/conferences/941

China/Torture

Evidence and Torture

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 0 Comment

As can be seen in this New York Times article and BBC report from May 31 reports some interesting news on the legal front when it comes to torture:

The top judicial and law enforcement bodies in China have issued new guidelines that seek to halt the use of torture in obtaining confessions or witness testimony, especially in death penalty cases.

The rules, announced Sunday, would nullify evidence gathered through violence or intimidation and give defendants the ability to challenge confessions presented during their trials.

There are two new sets of guidelines issued on May 30, the 《关于办理死刑案件审查判断证据若干问题的规定》focusing on death penalty cases, and the《关于办理刑事案件排除非法证据若干问题的规定》which focuses on other criminal cases.1 The New York Times notes that China’s authorities have been willing to recognize the problem for some time, citing a 2003 report by China’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate admitting that forced confessions had led to hundreds of deaths suspects. While bans of torture have been on the books in the post 1949 period at least since the late 1950s, even at the level of law, some organizations have long complained that the bans do not define torture comprehensively enough, let alone back these laws with real action.2

A Xinhua article announcing the regulations suggests that judges previously could exclude such evidence but lacked sufficiently detailed guidelines, leading to many cases in which it was accepted:

The new regulations define illegal evidence and include specific procedures on how to exclude such evidence.

Lu Guanglun, a senior judge at the Supreme People’s Court, said such details do not exist in the Criminal Procedure Law and its judicial interpretations.

“This is the first time that a systematic and clear regulation tells law enforcers that evidence obtained through illegal means is not only illegal but also useless,” said Zhao Bingzhi, dean of the law school at Beijing Normal University.

“Previously we could only infer from abstract laws that illegal evidence is not allowed. But in reality, in many cases, such evidence was considered valid,” he said.

The guidelines ban evidence obtained through torture but also other problematic evidence. Danwei helpfully translates the six kinds of evidence now banned for use in death penalty cases listed in a 新京报 article on them.

A Long Road

The continued failure to eliminate torture in China is deeply troubling, and clearly not enough is being done. However, the Chinese Public Security Bureau (公安部) has recognized, at higher levels, at least, that confessions gained from torture ultimately do more harm than good as far back as the Sino-Japanese War and even earlier.

In a posting here at Frog in a Well last year, Working to Protect Your Human Rights, I reviewed Chinese Communist Party efforts to eliminate torture (刑讯) in favor of an approach of persuasion (说服) with arrested treason suspects during the Sino-Japanese War in Shandong Province. Internal party reports that I have read urged treason elimination cadres to “protect human rights” (保障人权) and continue to refer to the problem and criticize responsible units all throughout the war and into the civil war period, suggesting that they were never fully successful.

To expand on the examples in the above mentioned posting, take for example, one April, 1943 document criticizing the work of the “treason elimination department” (鋤奸部）of the Communist Party in the Jioadong base area of Shandong that can be found in the Shandong Provincial Archive. This document, “A summary of an investigation on the Jiaodong Trotskyist case and initial opinions on the work of the Jiaodong treason elimination work” (膠東托派案的審查總結及對膠東鋤奸工作的初步意見) is one of many similar documents I have come across reviewing and condemning mistakes made by the treason elimination cadres, especially on cases related spurious cases of “Trotskyist traitors” that plagued the party long after the CCP stopped focusing on the supposed Trotskyist threat and shifted its focus to punishing spies for the Japanese and other collaborators. In this document, all Trotskyist cases from 1941-43 are said be basically mistakes (基本是錯誤的) and the treason elimination organs must take responsibility.

Though a number of different problems are listed, the most relevant is:

In interrogation work, one of the most serious issues is the from top-to-bottom universal use of of torture, which are evil acts in violation of our policy (自上而下普遍的使用刑訊，這面真是犯政策的罪惡行為).3

The opinion concludes that, “not only have these personal mistakes caused psychological and physical harm to the health and progress of cadres, but are also a threat to our political prestige.” It calls for a reorganization of the treason elimination department to better control and supervise their work, and calls for the better education of its cadres.

Though they rarely show any kind of moral outrage, astute analysts within the Communist Party have long recognized that torture has an impact both on the cadres who carry it out, but also the prestige of the Party. This I believe is a substantive difference between them and the widespread torture sanctioned and promoted by the KMT’s wartime agents up to the highest level, including Dai Li, and torture carried out by many other totalitarian regimes in the 20th century. These documents do not call for these acts to be better hidden from the public, but consistently call for their elimination and the reform of cadres responsible.

Since outwardly advertised condemnations of torture by the party match internally distributed condemnations of the same in the case of the CCP, then studying the persistence of torture in Communist China from the wartime to the present day ought to focus on understanding why and how the gap opened up between not the external and internal policy, since I haven’t found much evidence of one, but between the higher level cadres and the interrogation officers on the ground. This is the kind of gap which was targeted in United States attempts to grapple with the widespread persistence of police torture (“third degree” interrogations) among the police in the Wickersham report of 1931.4

More Needs to Be Done

Issuing clear guidelines blocking “illegal” evidence obtained through torture is an important step in the right direction. This can be seen as a message delivered to two primary recipients. First, China is making a statement to its own people, who have been outraged by the tragic-comical case of Zhao Zuohai who was tortured into confession and imprisoned for over a decade for committing a murder of someone who wasn’t even dead. Second, the judiciary is sending a message to interrogation officers in the Public Security Bureau who may be proud of the confessions they extract through their violent means.5 PSB officers likely have incentives to produce such confessions in terms of an increased number of cases solved as well as personal satisfaction that a villain has been caught and prosecuted. If they believe that a bit of “third degree” interrogation will starve them of that solved case and allow a guilty (or innocent) suspect go free, then this may reduce the occurrence of such abuses.

However, this is just not enough. There is ample evidence that having such rules of evidence on the books is simply insufficient to create real changes in the interrogation room. We need only look in neighboring Japan for evidence of this. Japan outlawed torture as early as 1879 but a truly shocking variety of torture techniques were widespread until 1945. In the postwar 1947 constitution, Article 36 explicitly states that, “The infliction of torture by any public officer and cruel punishments are absolutely forbidden.” while Article 38 states pretty much what China has stated in its newly announced regulations, “Confession made under compulsion, torture or threat, or after prolonged arrest or detention shall not be admitted in evidence.”

A clear legal prohibition on using evidence tainted with torture doesn’t help if the courts do not admit that the practice occurs. In the forty years leading up to 1994, there were over 12,000 complaints of torture in Japan, of which only fifteen complaints were accepted in court, with only eight resulting in police punishment.6

The reality is, however, that police torture does exist in postwar Japan, with beatings and other objectionable practices in interrogations continue down to the present day. We must note, however, that there is little evidence that the severity of torture, the numbers of deaths, etc. are anywhere near the scale of torture reported in the Chinese case. Outright beatings of suspects and prisoners have been seem to be on the decline in postwar Japan and a variety of other more subtle forms of psychological and physical pressure have become more dominant.7 In a case reminiscent of the Zhao Zuohai debacle in China, we might remember the release last year of Sugaya Toshikazu whose DNA tests showed he wasn’t the perpetrator in a murder for which he had already served 17 years in prison. Sugaya claims to have been threatened and beaten by detectives into making his confession.

There is growing anger about this issue in Japan and in 2006 the director of “Shall We Dance” Suo Masayuki produced the film “I just Didn’t Do It” to highlight the problem of forced confessions.8 What it shows, however, is that merely banning torture is not enough. Allowing lawyers access to prisoners during all interrogations, and ideally the filming of all prisoner interrogations (now trivial in terms of technological costs, even though it is widely opposed by police around the world) are really the only ways we can guarantee that confessions are obtained legally and without coercion.

UPDATE: Ella Chou has a good posting about this with a more informed discussion about where things need to go from now: Death Penalty, Torture, and Criminal Justice in China.

UPDATE 2013.5: Just read a fantastic overview of the development of rules regarding interrogations and torture in China over the past two decades by Ira Belkin, “China’s Tortuous Path Toward Ending Torture in Criminal Investigations” in Michael McConville and Eva Pils, ed. Comparative Perspectives on Criminal Justice in China (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013). Must read for anyone interested in this issue.

  1. According to the 新京报 article, the latter guidelines for regular cases bars the use of illegal evidence in deciding the case (非法取得物证不可以定案) and will ask officers to testify as to whether or not there was torture.  ↩

  2. See Amnesty International’s 2001 report on torture in China, section 4.  ↩

  3. Shandong Provincial Archives G024-01-0648-001 膠東托派案的審查總結及對膠東鋤奸工作的初步意見 1943.04.27 ↩

  4. Its conclusions on torture in the US are found in its Volume 11 “Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement.” One of the authors of the report famously said that it, “was greeted by the police with two answers which they regarded as conclusive: first, there wasn’t any third degree; and second, they couldn’t do their work without it.” Quoted in G. Daniel Lassiter Interrogations, Confessions, and Entrapment Springer (2004), 55.  ↩

  5. One could argue that China’s human rights critics outside of China are a third recipient, but I’m not convinced it played a primary role in motivating the creation of these guidelines. My suspicion is that, this time, the primary motivation was domestic in origin.  ↩

  6. See Rajendra Ramlogan “The Human Rights Revolution in Japan: A Story of New Wine in Old Wine Skins?” Emory International Law Review (Spring, 1994), 182.  ↩

  7. In addition to beatings and the “binding fingers” these other techniques include threats to ruin the reputation of the suspect, forcing suspects to stand in a fixed position and waking the suspect in the middle of the night (sound familiar?), offering to allow family to be seen if confession is made, etc. See Jeff Vize “Torture, Forced Confessions, and Inhuman Punishments: Human Rights Abuses in the Japanese Penal System” UCLA Pacific Basin Law Journal (Spring, 2003), 334. In US State Department reports on human rights abuses in Japan, the period from 200-2009 focuses mainly on accusations of violence against prisoners within the highly secretive Japanese prison system. Another technique, which reminds of Tokugawa practices forcing suspected Christians to step on Christian images, is the forcing of suspects to step on the names of their ancestors, referred to as the practice of fumiji (踏み字).  ↩

  8. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to watch it. The Hong Kong DVD version of it available in the Harvard Law School video collection is too scratched up to watch. Its Japanese title is それでもボクはやってない.  ↩

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