I just received Tools of Culture: Japan’s Cultural, Intellectual, Medical, and Technological Contacts in East Asia, 1000s-1500s, part of the Asia Past and Present book series. I hadn’t ordered a book from the AAS previously and didn’t know what to expect. A pamphlet? Something printed on a desktop? I was pleasantly surprised to see that this inexpensive paperback book (just $22.40 with the AAS member discount!) is a high quality product equal to anything you would see from a university press. I haven’t read the book, but the form is reassuring, and the blurbs by prominent premodern Japanese historians on the back also convince. This looks like an excellent publishing option. As it gets harder to publish with the usual suspects, alternatives such as the various East Asia Center presses (Harvard, Michigan, Cornell), the new PMJS Papers, and other options that I probably don’t know about yet become attactive and important ways of maintaining scholarly standards while still getting our work into print.
Books and Articles/English/Foreign Views/Gender/General/globalization/Historiography/Japan/Journalism & Mass Media/martial arts/Popular Culture/江戸
Young Samurai Book One (of at least three): Harry Potter Bushido
I almost didn’t check Chris Bradford‘s Young Samurai: The Way of the Warrior out of the library when I saw it, but some instinct told me that it was something I should read. Perhaps it was the realization that Young Samurai was the first book in a series — oddly, though, there was no information on the other books1 — and therefore likely to have some serious publicity support from the publisher. Perhaps it was the realization that the publisher was Disney/Hyperion, which more or less guarantees a pretty substantial distribution and readership. Perhaps it was the hope that I might find, finally, some historical fiction worth recommending…..
The book is about a young English boy who’s shipwrecked in Japan in 1611, and gets adopted by a samurai family, while being stalked by the ninja pirates who killed his father and crewmates. So it was a bit Karate Kid and a bit of the story of Will Adams (more Samurai William than Shogun); nothing surprising, really, but all a bit familiar. Aside from fairly predictable ahistorical elements,2 commonplaces of martial arts fiction, and the implausible interpersonal relationships, nothing out of the ordinary.
I was about halfway through the book, though, when I realized what I was reading: it was the scene where Jack, the young Englishman, shows up at the school of his adopted father/patron — a formidable warrior — and all the students are introduced to the instructors at a big banquet. I put down the book, walked into the other room and said to my wife, “It’s Harry Potter in Japan!”
[spoilers, of course, under the fold]
As near as I can tell from the websites, the second book is coming out in the UK shortly, with the third book scheduled for next year and a TV deal in the works, but nothing on the US side about when the sequels might be available here. ↩
ninja, yes, and wakou pirates (who are also ninja) off the coast of eastern Japan in 1611, and the post-Enlightenment attitudes of the protagonist ↩
Male and female lightly engaged in erotic excess
The behavior of the people, the cosmic order, and the stability of the state were all linked in traditional Chinese political theory. Disorder in one would lead to disorder in the others. This cosmology had been pretty much worked out by the Han Dynasty. A good illustration of this principle comes from Commands and Admonitions for the Families of the Great Dao dating from 2551
Formerly, during the latter generations of the Han house, strong men began to carve up the empire. The mighty encroached upon the weak, and the people became deceitful and shrewd. Male and female lightly engaged in erotic excess. The government could not relieve the situation and families did not impose prohibitions. Cities were plundered and the common people were victims of injustice, even to the extent of being made slaves. The people were being devoured )ust as mulberry leaves are consumed by silkworms, and because of their grievances they began to consider revolt.
The pneumas [emanating from) their resistance blocked the heavens. This caused the five planets to depart from their measured movements, aphelial and parhelial comets to sweep the skies, and the fire star to depart from its position as adjunct. Then powerful ministers began to fight among themselves and hosts of treacherous people led one another [in rebellion].
After more than a hundred years, the Wei house received the mandate of Heaven and eradicated all of these evils. Calendrical signs showed that this was so. Their ascension was-recorded in the River [Chart} and the Luo [River Writings} and in other portents suspended in the heavens. Conforming to the celestial dispensation and the propitious times, I received the mandate to be Master of the Kingdom. The Martial Thearch [Cao Cao] launched the empire.
If anyone is wondering, the reason I keep posting all these little quotes and stuff for use in class is so that future teachers of Chinese history will know where to find them. The main future person I want to be able to find them is me, since the web seems a better place to keep ones notes than a hard drive.
translated Stephen Bokenkamp in Early Daoist Scriptures, p.179 ↩
Edging out the competition
For all those keeping track, behind youtube, the most recent site to be blocked by the firewall is blogspot. This means, for our readers in China, that China Beat is no longer available.[1]
Silver lining: China Beat fans in China without a VPN will have to read Frog in a Well instead.
[1] And perhaps even more devastating, my personal research blog is no longer available.
“Catching up”–conferences & SE Asia highways
It’s been quite some time since I have posted (teaching two classes this semester has had that effect), but I wanted to catch up by mentioning several conferences that I’ve been to this spring, and to give a plug for one or two others that I’ve heard about.
Two took place earlier this spring at NUS, “Emerging SE Asian STS” (January 2009) and “Toward a Trans-Asian STS” (March 2009), and the other was that traditional behemoth, AAS (Chicago 2009).
I’m lumping these together collectively because I think there remains a lot to offer in terms of comparative work with South Korea and other emerging / new nations which received substantial aid in the 1945-1970 period, including the ROK, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Vietnam. That is, I’m becoming more obsessed lately with the loose notion of “comparative developmental states,” rather than South Korea or post-war NE Asia in isolation.
Specifically, I’m interested in the role of South Korea as an agent of international / US construction interests, looking at the build-up of expertise and funding by Hyundai. Just to cite one quick example, Hyundai worked on the Pattani-Naratiwat highway project (Dec. 1965-March 1968) in southern Thailand (almost on the Malaysia border) for their first big international project, losing money and going beyond the time projection in the process. But the project was mobilized as a success and Hyundai contruction subsequently gained access to the Vietnam market, winning bids through RMK-BRJ, a Texas-based consortium (Think “Friends of LBJ,” as Brown and Root funded his 1948 Senate run) that controlled many of the bids coming from the US Navy. Lee Myung-Bak was there, too, and many Korean elites used this context (SE Asia, Thailand and Vietnam) to build their careers.
I’ll be working on this more later, but mention it now as I’m familiar with the military role played by the South in Vietnam, but am just beginning to recognize the infrastructural role, especially when present-days scandals about construction in Iraq are still emerging. It’s also another area with overlaps between Imperial japan and Imperial America, with South Korea acting as an on-site representative in the latter case.
That’s just a brief note for now, and wondering if anyone out there has anything to say about “Scientizing Korea’ at USC this spring (April), or the upcoming Japanese science workshop (May) at UCLA?
Zhao Ziyang
Zhao Ziyang’s memoir will be out soon. Some special people got advance copies, and you can see their reactions at CDT. Fillial children will remember that Father’s Day is right around the corner.
China at War
Something cool via Wikipedia. A film of a naval engagement in the First Sino-Japanese war. It comes from a Japanese site, and I’m not sure of the provenance, and it’s not as clear as you might like, but it is still cool. To avoid overtaxing your browsers (and my technical abilities) I will just include it as a link.
But what about the books?
So supposedly they are going to tear down my office building and replace it with a new one. This may end up not happening, and it will probably not happen real soon, but this time it is apparently coming. Besides the hassles of being in a temporary office for a year, what is going to happen with all my books? I took a weird shaped interior office specifically so I would have room for them all1 and now they are going to spend a year in limbo and then what? Will they all fit in the new office? What will happen to my careful system of disorganization? Could they maybe just cut my arm off and leave it an that?
I was going to write a poem about all this, but Bai Juyi already did it for me
Bai Juyi, On the Cabinet for My Literary CollectionI broke up cypress to make a book cabinet,
the cabinet sturdy and the cypress strong.
Whose collection is stored there?-
the heading says “Bai Ledan.”
My lifetime’s capital is in writing
from childhood on to old age.
Seventy scrolls from beginning to end,
in size, three thousand pieces.
I know well that at last they will be scattered,
but I cannot bear to rashly throw them away.
I open it up, I lock it tight,
placing it by my study curtain.
I am childless Deng You,
and there is no Wang Can in this age.2
I can only entrust it to my daughter
to keep and pass on to my grandchild.3
Productive Procrastination
The Journal of the Historical Society has put five recent articles up for free, including a four-year old essay by Herman Ooms on the state of Tokugawa intellectual history. Aside from the gallop through the history of state-of-the-field essays, it includes a quick, very positive, look at European scholarship in French and German. I’m not sure how long these articles (the rest of them look interesting, too, but not Asian studies) will be up, but I’ll be going back there for fun in between stacks of grading this week and weekend.
And, as a bonus, some 1920s British Jiujitsu demonstration films which really need someone who knows more about martial arts history to put into proper context.
“Prosthetic Memories”
Seungsook Moon at Japan Focus has an interesting historiographical essay about the contested life and legacy of Park Chung Hee, who led Korea through the 60s and 70s. The debate is particularly interesting because it parallels discourses which are ongoing in other post-dictatorial societies, including the debates about Stalin in Russia, Mao and Deng in China, Chiang Kaishek in Taiwan, etc. The history itself is fascinating, though I do wish Moon had spent a little more effort mediating some of the factual basis for the competing narratives.
The Lady's Army
In teaching the Tang dynasty one thing I like to talk about is the Princess of Pingyang, d. 623 who assisted her father the Tang founder Gaozu in setting up the empire by recruiting an army of 70, 00o bandits (the Lady’s Army 娘子軍) who assisted in the overthrow of the Sui and the establishment of the new dynasty. One reason to talk about this is that an imperial princess leading an army of 70,000 bandits is a cool story. Unfortunately we don’t know much about her other than that. The Tang Shu (scroll down) biography is quite short, but it does bring up the other event that makes her good to talk about in class. By the Song the old system of aristocratic family-based politics was replaced by a new, more bureaucratic and exclusively male political world. In the early Tang we are still back in the period of disunion in that women were still political actors in their own right. When the princess died some officials pointed out that as a woman she should not have drums at her funeral. 以礼，妇以礼，妇人无鼓吹. Implicitly they are saying that drums are male music. The emperor disagreed saying that drums were martial music 高祖曰：“鼓吹，军乐也1 Given that she had herself used drums to command troops in battle it was quite appropriate to have drums at her funeral. The categories of male and female, general and bandit would be a lot less permiable later in the dynasty
太常奏议，以礼，妇人无鼓吹。高祖曰：“鼓吹，军乐也。往者公主于司竹举兵以应义旗，亲执金鼓，有克定之勋。周之文母，列于十乱；公主功参佐命，非常妇人之所匹也。何得无鼓吹！”遂特加之，以旌殊绩；仍令所司按谥法“明德有功曰昭”，
i.e. not necessarily male or female, just associated with the military ↩
Dangerous Data
By now most of you have probably heard of the erasure of buraku — the segregated communities of Japanese outcastes — from Google Earth.1 The continuing discrimination against burakumin — hisabetsuminzoku2 is the phrase I was taught to use in the late ’80s, but it doesn’t seem to have stuck — which often uses their unique geographic footprint as a tool for identifying the otherwise indistinguishable burakumin from the rest of the Japanese population was the issue: having the maps on Google Earth made it too easy.
The discussion at H-Japan has been fairly low-key3 and the UCB Library has calmed the scholars’ fears by announcing that the only alterations were made to the Google Earth versions, not to the online digital archive versions. That narrows the problem a bit…
Continue reading →
I got that from a student just before it showed up on H-Japan. ↩
literally “peoples who have been discriminated against” ↩
though Paul Stephen Lim’s story of government pressure to downplay burakumin issues is pretty shocking ↩
Film Festival
Just received this from friends at the Japanese American National Museum:
The Japanese American National Museum is accepting film & video submissions for their Second annual ID Film Festival, a series of films that challenge and celebrate what it means to be Asian.
To take place from October 1-3, ID Film Fest will showcase both shorts and features to be screened digitally in the Democracy Forum, a state of the art theater in downtown Los Angeles.
ID Film Fest welcomes film and video works of all lengths and genres that challenge and celebrate what it means to be Asian and/or Asian American. Please direct all inquiries to ksakai@janm.org
To see the films that we screened at last year’s festival, visit http://www.janm.org/events/2008/idfilmfest/films/
Please send a one-paged synopsis of the work along with contacts (e-mail, address and phone), a short biography of the filmmaker and a DVD screener to the:
Japanese American National Museum
Attention: Koji Steven Sakai
369 E. First St.
Los Angeles CA 90012
There is no submission fee and no entry form is required. Submission deadline is AUGUST 1, 2009.
人民日报's Suez Canal (and other commentary)
As I was flipping through the People’s Daily from the 1950s recently, something completely unrelated to my research caught my attention[1]: political cartoons regarding foreign policy. Ironically, unlike most American political cartoons, People’s Daily cartoons (at least from this time period) are almost exclusively about foreign policy, specifically the West’s interference in the non-Western world.
I’ve reproduced a few of my favorites below.[2] I think what I find most striking about these cartoons is how incredibly astute they are. I guess reading through the People’s Daily, one would expect to find nothing but propaganda, and while these views are a bit biased, they are not really incorrect, or even necessarily unbalanced.
