Anecdotes/China-Japan/War/昭和

Japanese Soldiers Use an Accountant’s Trick

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 2 Comments

I haven’t been making any substantial posts to Frog in a Well of late even though I have been buried in fascinating historical materials as I write my dissertation. I have decided, however, to share the occasional short anecdote that pops up in some of the secondary and primary sources I come across.

In his book on wartime Communist efforts in village China, Dagfinn Gatu brings up an interesting technique used by Japanese soldiers. Chinese Communist regular and guerrilla forces were severely short of weapons throughout the war. Since Communist insurgents far outnumbered the weapons available, the capture of one functioning Japanese weapon from the battlefield essentially put one more armed opponent into the field. As in most similar asymmetrical wars, this loss of equipment was taken very seriously by the Japanese occupation forces. However, a Japanese platoon commander who later became a historian, Fujiwara Akira shows how one trick was employed of shifting around one’s losses in reports to superiors:

“In recording combat results greater attention was paid to the amount of captured weapons than to the number of abandoned corpses. For that reason, army units put aside seized weapons to prepare for the eventuality of heavy combat losses by diluting these in reports on battle achievements.”1

  1. Quoted in Dagfinn Gatu, Village China at War, p. 207. Original in Fujiwara Akira Chûgoku sensen jûgunki (Tokyo: Otsuki shoten, 2002) pp. 51-52, 63-65 – not sure which of these page ranges.  ↩

Anecdotes/China/Sino-Japanese Wars

A Farmer Learns his Chinese Characters

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 1 Comment

I haven’t been making any substantial posts to Frog in a Well of late even though I have been buried in fascinating historical materials as I write my dissertation. I have decided, however, to share the occasional short anecdote that pops up in some of the secondary and primary sources I come across.

If you have studied Chinese you may know how hard it is to maintain memory of those characters. I remember being impressed with a friend who attached little labels on everything around the house to help his girlfriend learn German vocabulary. Looks like this is a method with a lot of history behind it. In a section talking about literacy in Communist controlled areas of wartime China, Dagfinn Gatu brings up a patronizing anecdote from Jack Belden’s China Shakes the World I don’t remember coming across describing one way to remember the Chinese characters:

“A farmer plowing his field would put up one character on a big board at each end of the field. Thus, going back and forth all day, even his primitive mind could grasp the complex convolutions.”1

  1. Quoted in Dagfinn Gatu, Village China at War, p. 77. Originally in Jack Belden, China Shakes the World, p. 117.  ↩

Current/Recent Events/Economic/Events/Japan/US-Japan/平成

America’s “Lost Decade”

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

Paul Krugman wrote a column in which he argued that the last decade in the US has been a waste of time, economically speaking:

But from an economic point of view, I’d suggest that we call the decade past the Big Zero. It was a decade in which nothing good happened, and none of the optimistic things we were supposed to believe turned out to be true.

It was a decade with basically zero job creation. …
It was a decade with zero economic gains for the typical family. …
It was a decade of zero gains for homeowners, even if they bought early …
… it was a decade of zero gains for stocks, even without taking inflation into account. …
So here’s what Mr. Summers — and, to be fair, just about everyone in a policy-making position at the time — believed in 1999: America has honest corporate accounting; this lets investors make good decisions, and also forces management to behave responsibly; and the result is a stable, well-functioning financial system.

What percentage of all this turned out to be true? Zero.

What was truly impressive about the decade past, however, was our unwillingness, as a nation, to learn from our mistakes.

Even as the dot-com bubble deflated, credulous bankers and investors began inflating a new bubble in housing. Even after famous, admired companies like Enron and WorldCom were revealed to have been Potemkin corporations with facades built out of creative accounting, analysts and investors believed banks’ claims about their own financial strength and bought into the hype about investments they didn’t understand. Even after triggering a global economic collapse, and having to be rescued at taxpayers’ expense, bankers wasted no time going right back to the culture of giant bonuses and excessive leverage.
…
So let’s bid a not at all fond farewell to the Big Zero — the decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing. Will the next decade be better? Stay tuned. Oh, and happy New Year.

My mother sent me the column, and I wrote back the following comparison:

It’s almost like we had the same Lost Decade that the Japanese had in the 90s, but in a much more dramatic fashion. They had the Aum Shinrikyo gas attacks; we had 9/11. They had the Hanshin Earthquake, we had Katrina; both triggered a discussion about emergency preparedness and civil society. They had a bubble burst and zero growth; we had several bubbles burst and, ultimately, zero growth.

Unfortunately, it’s very clear that Japanese leaders and citizens didn’t learn very much from the experience: it took almost another decade before a major change in leadership, and their economy remains extremely weak. Not a happy comparison.

China/Mongols and Mongolia/Song/Teaching

Holiday reading: Murder, treachery and genocide

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

As I am half-heartedly getting ready for the Spring I am putting together some readings for my students. What survey would be complete without a chunk from the Secret History of the Mongols? So if you are looking to take a break from your preparations for Taiwan’s Constitution Day this is a good way to take a break.  I would like to claim that I have carefully studied the whole text and picked out the best bit to give you a picture of Mongol society, but that’s not really true. It is a good read though, if a little long for use in class.

from Chapter Four

After getting Ong Qan to come, Cinggis Qa’an and Ong Qan decided to move jointly against Jamuqa. They set out downstream along the Keluren River. Cinggis Qa’an sent Altan, Qucar and Daritai as vanguard; Ong Qan for his part sent as vanguards Senggum, Jaqa Gambu and Bilge Beki. Patrols were also dispatched ahead of these vanguards: at Enegen Guileni they set up an observation post; beyond that, at Mount Cekcer, they set up another observation post; and beyond that, at Mount Ciqurqu, they set up a further observation post. Altan, Qucar, Senggum and the others of our vanguard arrived at Utkiya. While they were deciding whether to camp there, a man from the observation post which had been set up at Ciqurqu came riding in haste and brought the news that the enemy was approaching. When this news came, without setting up camp they went towards the enemy in order to gain information. They met and gained the information: when they asked the enemy patrol who they were, it turned out to be Jamuqa’s vanguard consisting of A’ucu Ba’atur of the Mongols, Buyiruq Qan of the Naiman, Qutu, the son of Toqto’a Beki of the Merkit, and Quduqa Beki of the Oyirat. These four had been going towards us as Jamuqa’s vanguard.
Our vanguard shouted at them, and they shouted back, but it was already getting late. Saying, ‘Tomorrow we’ll fight!’, our men withdrew and spent the night together with the main body of the army.
Next day the troops were sent forward and when they met, at Koyiten, they battled. As they pressed on each other downhill and uphill, and reformed their ranks, those very same Buyiruq Qan and Quduqa, knowing how to produce a rainstorm by magic, started to conjure it up, but the magic storm rolled back and it was right upon themselves that it fell. Unable to proceed, they tumbled into ravines. Saying to each other, ‘We are not loved by Heaven!’, they scattered.
Buyiruq Qan of the Naiman separated from the rest and went towards Uluq Taq on the southern side of the Altai Mountains. Qutu, the son of Toqto’a of the Merkit, went towards the Selengge River. Quduqa Beki of the Oyir went towards the Sisgis River, making for the forest. A’ucu Ba’atur of the Tayici’ut went towards the Onan River.
Jamuqa plundered the very people who had elected him qan; then he moved homewards following the course of the Ergune. As they were dispersing in this way, Ong Qan pursued Jamuqa downstream along the Ergune while Cinggis Qa’an pursued A’ucu Ba’atur of the Tayici’ut in the direction of the Onan.
As soon as A’ucu Ba’atur reached his own people, he had them moved along with him in haste. The Tayici’ut A’ucu Ba’atur and Qodun Orceng arrayed their troops at Ulengut Turas on the other side of the Onan, and stood in battle order ready to fight.
Cinggis Qa’an came up and fought with the Tayici’ut. They battled to and fro incessantly until evening came; then, in the same place where they had been fighting, they passed the night right next to each other. When people [the refugees] arrived, fleeing in disarray, they set up a circular camp and also passed the night in the same spot, alongside their troops.  In that battle Cinggis Qa’an was wounded in a vein of the neck. He could not stop the bleeding and was in a great plight. He waited till sundown, then he pitched camp just there where the two armies had encamped right next to each other.
Jelme sucked and sucked the blood which clogged Cinggis Qa ‘an’s wound and his mouth was all smeared with blood. Still, Jelme, not trusting other people, stayed there and looked after him. Until the middle of the night he swallowed down or spat out mouthfulls of the clogging blood.
When midnight had passed Cinggis Qa’an revived and said, ‘The blood has dried up completely; I am thirsty.’ Then Jelme took off his hat, boots and clothes – everything – and stark naked but for his pants, he ran into the midst of the enemy who had settled right next to them. He jumped  on to a cart of the people who had set up a circular camp over there. He searched for kumis, but was unable to find any because those people had fled in disarray and had turned the mares loose without milking them.
As he could not find kumis, he took from one of their carts a large covered bucket of curds and carried it back In the time between his going and coming back he was not seen by anyone. Heaven indeed protected him!
Having brought the covered bucket of curds, the same Jelme, all by himself, searched for water, brought it back and having mixed it with the curds got the Qa’an to drink it.
Three times, resting in between, the Qa’an drank, then he spoke: ‘The eyes within me have cleared up.’ He spoke and sat up: it was daybreak and growing light. He looked and saw that, all about the place where he was sitting, the wound-clogging blood that Jelme had kept on sucking and had spat about had formed small puddles. When he saw it, Cinggis Qa’an said, ‘What is this? Couldn’t you have spat farther away?’ Jelme then said, ‘When you were in a great plight, had I gone farther away I would have feared being separated from you. As I was in haste, I swallowed what I could swallow and spat out what I could spit out; I was in a plight myself and quite a lot went also into my stomach!’
Cinggis Qa’an again spoke: ‘When I was in this state, lying down, why did you run naked into their camp? Had you been caught, wouldn’t you have revealed that I was like this?’ Jelme said, ‘My thought, as I went naked, was that if somehow I got caught, I would have said, “I wanted to submit to you, but they found out and, seizing me, decided to kill me. They removed my clothes – everything – only my pants had not yet been removed when I suddenly managed to escape and have just come in haste to join you. They would have regarded me as sincere, they would have given me clothes and looked after me. Then, I would have jumped on a horse and while they were astonished watching me flee, in that brief moment I would have surely got back! So thinking, and because I wished to get back in time to satisfy the Qa’an’s craving for drink caused by his parching thirst, thinking this and without so much as blinking an eye I went there.’
Cinggis Qa’an said, ‘What can I say now? In former days, when the Three Merkit came and thrice circled Mount Burqan, you saved my life for the first time. Now, once more, you restored me to life when, with your mouth, you sucked the clotting blood from my wound. And, yet again, when I was in a great plight with a parching thirst, disregarding your life, you went amidst the enemy without so much as blinking an eye; you quenched my thirst and restored life to me. These three services of yours will stay  in my heart!’ Thus the Qa’an spoke.

Continue reading →

Academia/China-Japan/English/Foreign Views/Historiography/Japan/Korea-Japan/US-Japan/War/大正/明治

TR’s legacy for FDR: Japanese Aggression?

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

I really didn’t want to get into the discussion about James Bradley’s op-ed and interview because it’s finals season, and because the argument was so obviously wrong. Other historians have weighed in with a fairly negative review of the argument,1 but there’s a book behind it, so I suppose the discussion has to happen. Eric Rauchway did a reasonably good job of taking the Americanist side against Bradley; I’ve been in the comments over there, arguing, effectively, that there’s a bizarre amount of reality you have to ignore to make the connection between the Portsmouth Treat and Taft-Katsura on the one hand and the Manchurian Incident and Pearl Harbor on the other.

The presumption that Roosevelt doing something more aggressive with regard to Japan’s claims in Korea and elsewhere wouldn’t have produced the Pacific War sooner seems unlikely to me. The combination of US expansion in the Pacific (Hawaii as well as the Philippines) and anti-Japanese/anti-immigrant racism was already leading some Japanese to consider the US a likely competitor and enemy in the near future: an intransigent or pro-Russian Roosevelt would have failed to negotiate the Portsmouth treaty (against which the Japanese people rioted anyway, because there was no indemnity payment) and the US would likely have been unable to integrate Japan into the Wilsonian treaties of the ’20s, and the military would have been even more likely to move aggressively in China and the Pacific sooner than 1931.

From both sides, the US and Japanese, it’s hard to see what Roosevelt could have done differently, even assuming that he had the ahistorical inclination to do so that would have produced a better result.

There’s a satirical theme in Edge of the American West comments which routinely blames people for things that happened many, many years after or before their time. As absurd as it is, I had to point out that some people take it way too seriously. I also noted something which I’m going to have to be sure to emphasize next time I teach this, because I think it’ll clarify things for students:

Nobody intervened on the side of the Chinese, ever. Even the “Open Door policy” was pretty much a dead letter from the beginning. That’s why the Japanese thought they could get away with so much: the 21 Demands make it very clear the direction things are going to go, unless the Chinese can get their acts together quickly (which they didn’t). This is part of what made FDR’s intervention on their behalf so infuriating: it was out of character with the 19th century paradigm, and nobody had ever made a League of Nations decision the foundation of a diplomatic relationship (there was an attempt with the Italy/Ethiopia thing, but it didn’t stick).

I don’t know why people never get tired of “original sin” counterfactual arguments, but they sure don’t.

  1. There’s even a comment from D. Giangreco that I agree with, a rare event.  ↩

China/English

Brick, baby

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 3 Comments

I don’t know how many Chinese cities have these, but in Xian the buses mostly have Emergency Bricks

Brick

They are set on those two pins, so they don’t move around, but you can easily lift them up. Why are they there? Well, if the bus flipped over you might need to break a window to get out. You would need like a brick or something to do it with. Well, here is the brick. There is even a sign pointing to it sometimes, in case you can’t find it.

BrickSign

This struck me as a very Chinese-y low-tech safety measure, but one that would probably work.1  Sadly I did not take one of these bricks home with me. It would have been theft of state property, which is bad, and it would have killed my weight limit. Now of course I regret it. My office really needs an Emergency Brick for those occasions,  usually involving administrators, when one feels that all one’s problems could be solved with the application of a brick to the right spot.

  1. Some buses had little hammers for the same purpose. I think a brick would work better. Also people might steal a little hammer ↩

Books/China/English/Science and Technology

China, where the future is already the past

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 3 Comments

I have tried to stay off the subject of how the internet will change the world, since there is enough of that on the internet already. I was struck by this piece, (Via Sullivan)  which gushes about the wonderfulness of self-publishing, specifically the idea that Joshua Marshall is hiring a publisher.

The sheer joy of the idea that the creators should have the whip hand and “publishers” just be errand boys who handle making the copies  (think of a university without administrators) is likely to cloud the mind, but there is more to this than just happy visions of publishers tending the gardens of the Forbidden City. What would the world look like without publishers? Without music company executives?

Happily, China had a thriving printing culture for a good thousand years before the introduction of western-style printing machinery in the late 19th century created a modern publishing industry, so we know something about this.  The Chinese reluctance to adopt movable type  is even now sometimes presented as a puzzling example of the anti-technological bias of those silly people, but actually there was no great need for it. Woodblock printing had already begun revolutionizing Chinese culture by at least the Song dynasty, and movable type did not add much. One of the big advantages of woodblock printing was that it cheaper and required less capital. To print a book with movable type need a set of type with many copies of each letter (expensive in the West, more so in China) and literate typesetters. Since the type is broken up up after printing a page you need to have the capital to buy enough paper (usually a major expense) and to wait for the things to sell or to swallow the loss if they don’t. With Chinese block printing you needed a literate author to write the book, but then you could paste the paper on a woodblock and have an illiterate (and cheap) carver cut it out. Storing all the woodblocks could be a pain, but since you did not break them up you could print as many copies as you needed (print on demand!) and then keep the blocks. At least some literati would leave their woodblocks in their wills. (I know Yuan Mei did, and I would guess others did too.) There was far less need for the work publishers do and the capital they provide.

China certainly had publishers going back at least to the Ming. Cynthia Brokaw has written about the small-scale publishing houses that churned out and distributed cheap books for the masses. The commanding heights of Chinese publishing, however, were occupied by the literati-publishers who were better known as writers, editors, and collators than as publishers.  If a person had a reputation that would sell books they did not need a lot of capital to go into business for themselves. China did not have much by the way of copyright law back then, but they were somewhat protected by the fact that they had already made up the printing blocks for their famous works. This would not help the small publishers making cheap copies of the Four Books, of course, so they lived in a cutthroat low-margin market while the more elite writers floated above that.

This seems to be sort of what technology is creating today. Publishers still exist, and if you want to publish “Chicken Soup for a Goldfish’s Soul” you will need a publisher to advertise it and make sure that stacks of it are piled up at the local gas station. If you are famous enough and not really wanting to go after Stephen King’s sales records self-publishing is getting easier and easier. We may end up with a two-tier system like China had.

Oddly, the one place where new publishing trends are not really taking hold is academia. You would think that given all the authors who sell dozens of books on their own reputations rather than marketing hype, and the fact that getting it out there rather than getting rich is the goal, scholars would go in for self or electronic publishing. Journals certainly have, but academic books of course serve a purpose other than being read, which is proving that you are a scholar by coming out in hardback with the name of a publisher on the spine so that you can keep your job. The cultural importance of publishers is still there, and it will be interesting to see how long they can resist the technological trends that are moving away from them.

There is a lot of scholarship on this, although I would not blame any of the people below for the errors above.

Brokaw, Cynthia J. Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods. Harvard University Asia Center, 2007.

Brokaw, Cynthia J., and Kai-Wing Chow. Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China. 1st ed. University of California Press, 2005.

Rawski, Evelyn. Education and Popular Literacy in Ch’ing China. University of Michigan Press, 1979.

Reed, Christopher A. Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937. University of Hawaii Press, 2004. 

Academia/English/Intellectual/Japan/Literature/Translation/江戸

Ueda Akinari translation

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

PMJS has published William Clarke and Wendy Cobcroft’s annotated translation of Ueda Akinari’s Tandai Shoshinroku, available as a free PDF and also as a book-on-demand from Lulu (and eventually Amazon). I leave the commentary on the value of scholarly networks, non-profit online publishing, and the finally-growing body Early Modern translations as an exercise for our readers, who don’t need me to tell them what they already know.

Blogs and Carnivals/China/Economics/English/Historiography

Nine Nations

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 3 Comments

With Obama in China lots of websites want to say something about China and What It All Means. For example, The Atlantic has a post by Patrick Chovanic that describes the Nine Nations of China, dividing China into nine separate regions, rather than viewing it as a monolithic whole. As Jeremiah Jenne points out this is such a good idea that William Skinner published a similar map back in 1977. Skinner’s macro-regions have become one of the old standbys of China studies (since before I was in school.)

I think Jeremiah is being a bit too kind here in praising Chovanic for popularizing Skinner’s work, and Chovanic is a bit off-base in claiming that Skinner’s work “reached similar conclusions” to his. If you read Chovanic’s descriptions of the regions he is trying, I think, to present the idea that each of these different areas has its own “animating force or character that defines each region.” This sound very fuzzy, and it is not fair to Skinner to compare his methodical work on economic and cultural patterns with data from  “personal experience traveling, living, and doing business in those places.” More importantly, Skinner did not see his regions as necessarily having different characters.1 As Esherick and Little pointed out in the Journal of Asian Studies in 1986 this is exactly what Skinner’s model does not do. 2 Skinner was interested in, among other things, in relations between core and peripheral counties inside the individual regions. Beijing -should- seem a lot like Shanghai in some respects because they are both top-level urban areas in their region. Chovanic seems to be suggesting that the only important distinctions are between individual regions. I’m not really sure this is helful at all. Skinner’s work had flaws, but it was remarkably robust, yeilding insights into what happened in China from well back into imperial times and forward to the present. Chovanic’s descriptions don’t even go back past 1980. Was the Northeast a “a Rust Belt of decaying industries with no future.” in the Qing or the Republic? Although the maps look similar, there is really not much in common between the two projects.

  1. Skinner argues that the economic geography of traditional China is best understood as a set of relatively distinct regions: nine “macroregions” defined by physiography and marketing hierarchies. Each macroregion is a functionally integrated rural-urban system with a relatively densely populated lowland core and a peripheral hinterland. The functional organization of each macroregion is constituted by the marketing hierarchies that link villages, market towns, and cities. Macroregions are distinct from one another; they are separated by relatively sharp boundaries defined by the orientation of local marketing systems. The factors that influence the shape and identity of each macroregion are economic-largely the constraints of transport cost. Thus Skinner provides a framework in terms of which to analyze the distribution of cities, transportation networks, trade networks, and so forth. This framework constitutes Skinner’s central thesis about the economic geography of China. He offers this thesis, however, in the context of a larger research hypothesis: that noneconomic phenomena (such as the spread of heterodox movements and rebellions, the structure of the imperial bureaucracy  and the cultural horizon of the peasant) are better understood when placed within the spatial framework of macroregions. This research hypothesis is of necessity less specific than the central thesis, for Skinner is fully aware of the many diverse factors that influence these noneconomic phenomena. Nonetheless the extended research hypothesis has stimulated much fruitful work on a wide range of phenomena. [summary from Esherick and Little] ↩

  2. Daniel Little and Joseph W. Esherick “Testing the Testers: A Reply to Barbara Sands and Ramon Myers’s Critique of G. William Skinner’s Regional Systems Approach to China” The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Feb., 1989), pp. 90-99 ↩

China/English

Shanking the China market

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

I’m a bit late on this, but apparent Tiger Woods lost a golf tournament in China. The article from ESPN is more about the reception of Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods among the Chinese fans. This actually makes sense, since the point of holding an event like this  in Asia is not really to hold an event, it is to attract the attention of customers who might buy Nike golf shoes or whatever.1 Woods apparently was not in a good mood at the event and did not  endear himself to the Chinese fans. Apparently Phil Mickelson is starting to challenge Tiger for the status of world’s greatest golfer.2 Even more important, he now has a Chinese nickname, meaning that he is catching up to Tiger in the even more important penetration of the Chinese market category. As a rule, if you small in China they just transliterate your name. If you are big you get a Chinese nickname.3 You would think Tiger would have that sewn up, being part Chinese and having an easy (if uncreative) nickname like “Lao Hu” (Tiger). But Mickleson is right behind him with the equally lame “Lao Mi” (Old Mi.) So apparently golf is getting some mindshare in China, but in a rather pedestrian way.

This seems to prove that golf is dull, since I can remember being in Taiwan in the 90’s and following 天飛牛 ( Heavenly Flying Cow) and his sidekick 小飛牛 (Little Flying Cow) as they battled for roundball supremacy against the 惡漢 (Loathsome Hero) and the Suns. Those were the only three guys in the association with real Chinese nicknames back then. Not sure if any of the current crop can match those.

  1. The people making the shoes might catch the match on TV, but they are not the real target here.  ↩

  2. I’m not a golf fan ↩

  3. Politicians seem to be to0 important to get a Chinese nickname ↩

Current/Recent Events/International Affairs/Japan/Occupation/US-Japan/明治/昭和/江戸

The Bow

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 9 Comments

President Barack Obama shakes hands and bows with Emperor AkihitoVia my old friend Scott Eric Kaufman I learned that President Obama’s visit to Japan was drawing criticism from the American right (I also learned that President Eisenhower bowed in public to a number of heads of state) due to Obama’s bowed greeting to Emperor Akihito.

Most of the commentary (this is an excellent roundup) hinges on whether it’s inappropriate for an American Head of State to bow to another Head of State. This is, of course, why Kaufman was noting Eisenhower’s bows, none of which were, apparently, mutual; other commenters have noted Clinton’s bow fifteen years earlier, and Nixon’s bow/handshake greeting with Emperor Hirohito. Some of the criticism is nuanced enough to note that mutual bows are appropriate greetings in Japan, but suggests that Obama’s bow was inappropriately deep and therefore servile and inappropriate.

Part of the problem in discussing this is the assumption that there is a stable protocol: Japan’s modern Imperial institution is younger than the American Republic, and interactions with other heads of state have always been somewhat improvisational. Before the Meiji Restoration, the Emperor didn’t meet heads of state. For centuries, the Emperor basically met nobody who wasn’t a member of the court aristocracy or high officials of the shogunal state: there was no public protocol except for a vague tradition that required the Emperor be above the gaze of anyone, not to be looked down upon. That tradition was revived in the Imperial era, but it wasn’t much guidance in dealing with modern crowds, photography, diplomatic visits. Even Meiji’s coronation ceremony was an innovation, purged of Chinese elements and enhanced with Shinto rituals. (See Keene, ch. 18) The first head of state to visit was Hawaiian King Kalakaua, but he was actually preceeded by a visit from former President U.S. Grant who greeted the Emperor with handshakes. Every time an aristocrat or diplomat met the Emperor, protocol had to be negotiated in advance, and it shifted over time: when and how much to bow, whether handshakes would be permitted, whether foreign women could enter the Emperor’s presence with their diplomat husbands, etc. But this wasn’t yet the great age of state visits: that doesn’t come until the 20th century, and the rise of air travel.

Before the next America presidential visit with a Japanese emperor, though, WWII intervened: the Japanese Emperor was demoted from sacred and inviolable to the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people. More importantly, perhaps, Japan became a neo-colonial extension of American power for a time (when that time ends is a matter of debate, of course) so that Presidential courtesies like Nixon’s bow were harmless to American power. By the time of Clinton’s gesture, though, Japan’s economic power was a threat to American dominance (well, with the 90s recession, not really, but pundits had spent a good portion of the ’80s talking up the Japanese threat, and the impression stuck), and the Imperial transition of 1989 took away the American sense that the Emperor was someone who had been defeated and disarmed. Even Clinton’s gesture towards a bow was too much for some, apparently: the very concept of monarchy raised spectres of pre-Revolutionary attitudes, though bowing is not necessarily a subservient act when done between equals (or by a superior) in the Japanese tradition.

Obama’s bow is a very formal one — formality and hierarchy are two different things — and in the context of a handshake. It doesn’t change the nature of the US-Japan relationship as much as the election of Japan’s new non-LDP PM, as much as the rising nationalistic culture, as much as the ongoing shifts in the economic relationship between two of the largest — and most obviously struggling — economies in the world.

Korea/Libraries/Web Sites

Now in Firefox: Korean Newspapers at the National Library

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 0 Comment

I just heard from one of our fellow contributors here at Frog in a Well that the National Library of Korea now offers limited support for a variety of browsers! Up until now anyone trying to use any browser except Internet Explorer in the Windows operating system would not get far beyond the search component of the national library – a source of endless frustration for many of us who do not use Windows.

However, one can now view at least some (I have not confirmed this for all digital resources) of the scanned texts at the library using the “new viewer” (신규뷰어).

Visit, for example, the fantastic collection of rare pre- and postwar (despite what the header says) newspapers found here. I am able to view these without problem on both Firefox and Safari browsers.

Using the old search interface from the home page, default links to the original images or 원문 of old books that have been scanned by the library will also open in these browsers with the multi-browser new viewer if there is an brown icon of a book with no “won” image in it.

Many resources, including many pre-1945 Japanese language materials, however, seem to be blocked outside of the National library and certain partner libraries1 depending on the way one searches for that information.

I am very pleased to see this support and only hope they will also include support for printing (still IE only) and make sure that all their online resources will function. I also hope they will expand access to may items which clearly cannot be said to be protected by copyright from the colonial period, especially from the 1920s and earlier.

  1. I get the message blaming copyright restrictions: 접속하신 PC(IP:140. … )에서는 본 자료를 이용하실 수 없습니다. 본 자료는 저작권 관계로 국립중앙도서관 및 협약을 체결한 도서관 내의 지정된 PC에서만 이용하실 수 있습니다. Anyone else get access outside of Korea or in Korea but not at the National Library? I don’t know what libraries are included among the 협약을 체결한 도서관 outside of Korea, but here is a list of libraries within Korea where one can apparently get access.  ↩

China/Qing/visual culture/Web Sites and Resources

Common culture

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment
Not from the site,

China Gateway has some pictures, with translation, from The Dianshizhai Pictorial the famous late 19th century Shanghai illustrated paper. I say famous because it is rapidly becoming one of the most reproduced and re-packaged parts of Chinese culture. WorldCat shows 69 hits for the keywords 點石齋畫報 which includes full editions, selections (stories about Suzhou or whatever) translations into baihua, and some of the scholarly studies. I assume there is a lot more about it that you could dig up with other keywords.  Googleing yields lots of pictures like the above and even more commentary. It is a very Web-friendly sort of souce, since it is in short chunks, has pictures and a bit of text and above all is out of copyright.  In time the public image of the Late Qing may come to be tied as specifically to this bit of art as the T’ang is to poets or the European middle ages are to the Arthur stories.

Via China Beat

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