Japanology….

One of my general exam advisor/examiners has passed away: Donald Fleming who was Harvard’s preeminent intellectual historian for many years. I studied European intellectual history for the exam, which entailed sitting through his two-semester sequence on 19th and 20th century European thought and working through carefully selected (by him) portions of his absurdly long bibliography on the subject. I’m sure I’ve told the story before about how my heart stopped, briefly, when he put not one, but two bound photocopied volumes on the desk — dozens of pages in each — of single-spaced references, sorted by topic. Then came the paring down: His selections depended on your interests, to some extent, and it ended up being about the same 80-100 books that my other fields entailed.

He was a classic “ivy-covered professor,” the kind I didn’t think really existed until I met him. His office was filled with books. I don’t mean that he had full bookshelves: I mean that he had his bookshelves (which covered both of the long walls of the office) double-lined, and that nearly every horizontal surface in that office was also covered with stacks — one foot or more — of books. There was a fairly narrow path from the door to the table (I don’t know if he had a desk in there or not: I don’t remember seeing one, but it could have been hidden!), which then branched into two paths, one to each side. The table itself had a clear space in the middle, running across from one chair to the other. In his defense, I’m fairly sure he knew where everything was: I saw him on at least one occasion pick a book off the shelf without having to search for it.

His lectures were polished over decades: he always ended within seconds of the stroke of the clock-tower next door. He’d come into the classroom, mount the stage, remove the podium, open his briefcase, take out his notes, then create his own podium by setting the briefcase on end, and putting his notes on top of a portfolio on top of his open briefcase. He could barely see over the thing, and his students could barely see him. Took a while to understand him, as well: he had a vocal affectation that took me several lectures to figure out. It wasn’t an accent, though I did waste some time trying to figure out what accent it was, so I could understand him.1 After a week or two, I got used to it. He did not use TAs, because no graduate student could possibly know enough to satisfactorily discuss all the material in the course, but he did use graders. His study guides for exams were as bad as his reading bibliographies: page after page of possible essay questions, dozens for each one that would be on the test, covering nearly every topic in every lecture and every reading for the semester.2 There was no textbook: just his lectures and a stack of primary readings.

When I started at Harvard, I thought I was going to study intellectual transmission: how ideas came from the West into Japan. Al Craig advised me to pick general exam fields that supported my dissertation goals, so I took Fleming to get a foundation in the ideas that were coming into Japan (and Iriye, for diplomatic history). It was a good choice: I had no background in European or intellectual history outside of some introductory philosophy, and since Harvard had no required historiography course (and nobody suggested that I take it anyway), I had to get some theory somehow! So I got a pretty good dose of conservativism, liberalism, Marxism, linguistic theory (very different from the phonology/morphology we studied as undergrads!), social science, modernism and my first taste of post-structuralism. Since a lot of historical theory has to do with applying these theories in historical contexts, I think I made a good choice. (From a teaching perspective, it was a godsend: I never would have made it through Western Civ without it, though a general field in European history might have been more useful. Or a field in Chinese history; that would have been good, too!) From Fleming’s point of view, I was starting from near-total ignorance, and I know I barely made it through Generals (A friend saw me during the brief break in the middle of the two-hour session and said I looked “green.” Felt it, too.). As a friend pointed out, there wasn’t a lot of feminism in the mix, nor women at all; I’d started getting familiar with that as an undergrad, and my social science friends made sure I got more. Fleming was one of the early scholars to write on environmentalism, but that didn’t really show up in the surveys much, either.

Fleming was one of the few non-Asianists I dealt with at Harvard, and I think he considered me just as odd as I considered him. I did part of my General Reading year from Berkeley, and when I suggested that we could keep in touch by phone — this was before email was common — he looked shocked, then amused. We never did keep touch by phone: I found a friendly Europeanist at Berkeley who let me sit in on lectures and chat about books. Also Andy Barshay was running grad seminars with a heavy dose of historical theory; that helped, too. At one department party, I think the holiday part of my first year, I was talking to Fleming a bit: he asked me what I studied, and I said “Japan.” He spent a moment thinking out loud what the proper term for me was, then settled on “Japanology,” “like Astrology!” he quipped, very pleased with himself. I got the impression that he hadn’t seen many of us over the years. But it was kind of nice having one classically odd professor.


  1. I thought I was on to something with “Swiss”….  

  2. Yes, I still use Fleming as an example of how nice I am to my students. Wouldn’t you?  

Pinyin or bust

A recent obituary of John DeFrancis emphasized his personal desire to see the Chinese overhaul its writing system, claiming that the failure of the Communist government to move into a complete romanization of the system did not make Chinese as accessible to the masses as it could have been, an idea he also mentions in his books. Little did he know (although he probably did know) that the Communists realized the shortcomings of the character system as well. A publication from the Chinese language reform committee (中国文字改革委员会) in 1956, a small 50 page booklet about new legislation concerning language reform (both spoken and written) and the reasons behind it, the institutions it will affect, easy methods for making the switch from simplified to traditional, etc, explains the disadvantages of the character system. The booklet reads:

In today’s developing China, it [the character system] does not meet the demands of our new modern lifestyle, and it doesn’t satisfy the needs of the people.  In our language, each character has a unique form, but if you know the form you cannot necessarily read it’s pronunciation, and if you can read it’s pronunciation, you cannot necessarily write it’s form, and if you can read, write, and pronounce it, you don’t necessarily know it’s meaning, and only when you exhaustedly memorize each character’s form, sound, and meaning can you truly say that you know the character. Also, the strokes of characters are quite complicated. In 6 years of schooling, students can only study about 3000 characters, and they must be reinforced. Therefore, studying the character system, as compared to a romanized system, takes much more time, nearly 12 years of language study are necessary for a basic education, which is two years longer than most school systems around the world. Also, characters are used in the areas of writing books, copying, using technology, typing, searching words, and others, all of which use a lot of labor. This makes all of these areas that much harder to do, as it requires that we raise the basic level of education and culture, and all of this us done to preserve the character system. This gives the realization of our socialist country and the creation of our new ideals a much larger job to do.[1]

In the end, the booklet determines that because of historic precedent, cultural preservation, and continuity that the character system must be maintained, but all of the arguments against the character system seem quite interesting, implying that that is the next logical step. Perhaps that is why DeFrancis had such high hopes.


[1] 吴玉章。”为促进文字改革而努力.” 文字改革和汉字简化是什么回事?北京:中国文字改革委员会编印, 1956。

Liveblogging, slowblogging, Mammoth Blogging?

John McKay, at Archy, is publishing excerpts from his work on the natural history and historiography of wooly mammoths. The latest installment is about China, particularly the Kangxi Emperor’s (r. 1661-1722) collection of mammoth-related materials and, surprisingly, personal contributions to the field. It seems that under Kangxi’s tutelage, the Chinese realized that the mammoth was most likely related to the elephant, after centuries of referring to it as a giant but uncategorized rodent. (Also, he’s looking for some help with consistent Romanizations.)

Just for fun, it inspired me to pull my copy of Elvin’s Retreat of the Elephants off my “wanna read” shelf and go through the introduction and first few chapters, including “Humans v. Elephants: The Three Thousand Years War.” The charts and diagrams in the introduction are nearly worth the price of admission. I’m not sure if I’m going to have time to get through much more of it this semester, but the overlap with my Early China class (especially using Hansen as the text, who does take environmental issues seriously) is significant, and I’m going to try to make the time.

I’ve been known to assign absurdly long books before; has anyone used Elvin in class?

Like mixing water with water

Students often come to classes on China looking for the Timeless Wisdom of the Easttm As a historian I tend to dislike giving it to them, since the point of history is not to take wisdom out of historical context and apply it to your life.1 Still, I do like providing timeless wisdom when I can, and as we are talking about the origins of bureaucracy in China today I will be using this quote from the Zuo2 to talk about the difference between a minister and a toady. I suspect this will be one of the things that they can actually apply in their lives, if only as a great put-down.

Yan Ying on harmony and conformity

“Only [Liangqiu] Ju is harmonious (he) with me.”

[Yan Ying] answered: “Ju conforms (tong) with you; how can he be harmonious?”

The lord asked: “Are harmony and conformity different?”

[Yan Ying] answered: “They are different. Harmony is like a stew. Water, fire, jerky, mincemeat, salt, and plum [vinegar] are used to cook fish and meat; they are cooked over firewood. Then the master chef harmonizes them, mixes them according to taste, compensating for what is insufficient and diminishing what is too strong. The superior man (junzi) eats it to calm (ping) his heart.

It is the same with the ruler and minister. When there is something unacceptable about what the ruler considers acceptable, the minister points out the unacceptable in order to perfect the acceptability [of the ruler’s plan]. When there is something acceptable in what the ruler considers unacceptable, the minister points out the acceptable in order to eliminate the unacceptable. In this way the government is equalized (ping) and without transgressions, and the people have no contending (zheng) heart. …

As for Ju, he is not like this. Whatever you consider acceptable, Ju also says it is acceptable, whatever you consider unacceptable, Ju also says it is unacceptable. This is like complementing water with more water: who will be able to drink it? If the zithers and dulcimers were to hold a single tone, who could listen to it? This is how conformity (tong) is unacceptable.”

Zuo Zhao 20, cited in Pines 160-161


  1. Well, not the only point anyway 

  2. via Pines, Yuri. Foundations of Confucian Thought: Intellectual Life in the Chunqiu Period, 722-453 B.C.E. University of Hawaii Press, 2002.
     

North Korea’s engagement with the world

I remember the shocked look on my students’ faces fifteen years ago when I told them that we actually had no idea how decisions were made or leaders picked in North Korea, that it was more or less still a “black box.” I find it fascinating that we’re starting to get a better public picture of the internal processes of North Korea.

One of the reasons is the steady stream of refugees. In the Financial Times, Matthew Engel reports on a Korean enclave in the SW London suburb of New Malden. The relatively closed and self-reliant society is mostly middle-class, “bourgeois,” but among “the beginnings of an underclass” are North Koreans. I get the impression from the article that many of them are illegal immigrants, and their “underclass” status comes both from their lack of professional skills and their desire to remain outside of official notice.

Mitchell Lerner, at Ohio State University, believes that he’s found the key to understanding the Kim dynasty of North Korea: juche. And when “self-reliance” is slipping, domestically, they bluster internationally to bolster their credentials as strong and independent leaders. It’s counterintuitive: when they need help the most, they can’t get it. But their legitimacy as rulers is based on juche. He writes

In the political realm, it called for chaju (independence), in which North Korean leaders governed without constraint from outside pressure or internal challenge. Economically, juche called for charip (self-sustenance), which required a largely self-contained economy based on domestic workers using domestic resources to satisfy domestic needs. In international relations, juche advocated chawi (self-defense), a foreign policy based on complete equality and mutual respect between nations as well as the right of self-determination and independent policymaking.

Juche, simply, demanded the people subordinate themselves to the state, and the state in turn would advance their collective interests in accordance with the uniqueness and majesty of Korea, and always in pursuit of greater economic, political, and international independence.

By justifying the position of the suryong (single leader) and uniting the people behind him, juche successfully advanced Kim’s interests.

I’d call that a fairly textbook kind of fascism: emphasizing the independence of the nation, the subordination of the people to the nation, and the fuhrerprincip — the leader who embodies sovereignty. Even the reliance on the US as a hobgoblin echoes the “we have been denied our rightful place in the world” rhetoric of the early 20c fascist regimes. The only thing that distinguishes North Korea from them, really, is the longevity of the Kim dynasty. The Kim refered to in the above excerpt is Kim Il Sung, the founder of the DPRK; his son, Kim Jong Il, is one of the only examples I can think of of a successful fascist succession.

However, by closely associating the government’s legitimacy with its successful pursuit of juche, Kim had opened the door to potential disaster. When he triumphantly achieved juche, North Koreans would perpetuate and even embrace his rule. But if the pursuit was unsuccessful, the most fundamental justification for the regime would appear violated.

Legitimation of a government is always a double-edged sword. Some forms of legitimation have a sharper back edge than others: the Confucian Mandate of Heaven is like this, as well.

When considered within this framework, Kim’s tendency to behave more aggressively when he seemed to be at his weakest makes sense. Unable to deny economic and political instability that suggested his government was not acting in accordance with juche principles, Kim redoubled his efforts to demonstrate his strength and independence in the third juche realm, foreign policy.

He does a nice job fitting the periods of economic trouble with the eras of international tension. He also does a good job illustrating the claustrophobic environment — the limited, controlled media, the cradle-to-grave indoctrination, the purges, etc — which makes North Korea such a surreal place.

Update: Speaking of Surreal, Curzon has a post on Reverend Billy Graham’s relationship with North Korea, starting with his missionary ancestors. [via

Dutch Futurists

Alan Baumler pointed me to peacay’s recent post of Dutch images of 17th century Japan. Some of them are quite accurate — the images of samurai, in particular, are quite nice — and based on the observations of Dutch traders and scholars at the Deshima trading station in Nagasaki harbor. Some of the images are based on Indian or Chinese models (though the tradition of religious statuary shared between these cultures means that they’re not as terrible as you might think). Some are pretty bizarre, but that’s par for the course before the 19th century.

Then there’s the one that stopped me in my tracks:

17c Dutch Engraving of reverse rickshaw

You can find the original here, in the full context of the book. Someone who reads 17th century Dutch might be able to help me, because I’m quite curious about the text at this point. Without it, though, I can only speculate.

What’s wrong with this picture? Well, mainly the fact that the jinrikisha wasn’t invented for another two hundred years. Also, Japanese did not use wheeled carts for transporting goods.1. Before that, Japanese traveled mostly by foot and by boat. Samurai travelled by horse, sometimes. Other elites — including samurai, nobles, village headmen, the wealthy — traveled by palanquin (aka litter). Even the transport of commercial goods was mostly by boat and by hand.

While there seems to be some dispute about the origins of the rickshaw, nobody has ever suggested that it developed in the 1600s! I suspect what we see here is a failure of imagination. Having seen images of palanquins and bearers, but unable to concieve of transport without wheels, the illustrator added the — to him entirely obvious and necessary — elements. In the process, he created a shocking anachronism, and if anyone had taken these images seriously, could have radically altered the history of transportation.


  1. Hal Bolitho called Japan’s abandonment of the wheel one of the great mysteries of Japanese history, along with the failure to adopt the chair and the survival of the Imperial institution  

Making China democratic

Over at A Ku Indeed people have been discussing Bell’s East and West, which is an attempt to create a dialogue between Western and Eastern concepts of rights. I have not been that impressed with the book, but Chris had an interesting post on Bell’s final suggestion, that the way to democracy in China is to protect the nation from the dangers of giving the vote to the uneducated masses by creating a “House of Scholars”  to balance the passions of the masses. I found this idea unsatisfying at first glance, but I have been struggling with why.

Continue reading →

Liveblogging the Boxers

Military historian David Silbey is going to be blogging through the Boxer Uprising as seen through the New York Times. Though this is a little more of a distant view than Brett Holman’s Sudenten Crisis, I’m really looking forward to it. I’ve used Paul Cohen’s History in Three Keys and read a few other things that touch on the Boxers, but the one perspective I’ve never really mastered is the Western one. And the Boxer Uprising was a critical one for the image of China in the 20th century, one of the few events in Chinese history about which people know something. The first post in the series just went up; if you fall behind, you can survey all of Silbey’s posts here.

A Dictionary that Could Change your Life

I see a lot of passing on of digital tools, and a fellow Fulbrighter sent along this link, a Chinese dictionary where you can write in the characters and it looks them up for you. I find it especially helpful for looking up strange characters in names while writing bibliographies. So for those too lazy/poor (like me) to buy a pocket dictionary that has the features, this will save you the trouble of ever having to look up a radical again.

The Relaunching of Sino-Japanese Studies

I wanted to post a plug for a project that I have been involved with recently:

Announcing the relaunch of Sino-Japanese Studies online

For fifteen years Sino-Japanese Studies (1988-2003) was published in hard form and distributed throughout the world. It was the only journal of its kind in content, bringing together Chinese and Japanese studies—irrespective of discipline or time period. The relaunched journal will be available open access online and will continue to be the only journal of its kind. It will contain original, refereed articles, translations, reviews, and news from the field. Interested readers and contributors may find further details on making submissions to the journal as well as access the full online archive of back-issues at:

http://chinajapan.org/

They may also contact the editor directly.

Joshua Fogel (fogel at yorku.ca), editor (傅佛果, ジョシュア・フォーゲル)
Konrad M. Lawson (konrad at lawson.net), web technician (林蜀道, コンラッド・ローソン)

Note: I have announced the availability of the full archive of back-issues here before, but now we are restarting the journal and accepting new submissions.

The Relaunching of Sino-Japanese Studies

I wanted to post a plug for a project that I have been involved with recently:

Announcing the relaunch of Sino-Japanese Studies online

For fifteen years Sino-Japanese Studies (1988-2003) was published in hard form and distributed throughout the world. It was the only journal of its kind in content, bringing together Chinese and Japanese studies—irrespective of discipline or time period. The relaunched journal will be available open access online and will continue to be the only journal of its kind. It will contain original, refereed articles, translations, reviews, and news from the field. Interested readers and contributors may find further details on making submissions to the journal as well as access the full online archive of back-issues at:

http://chinajapan.org/

They may also contact the editor directly.

Joshua Fogel (fogel at yorku.ca), editor (傅佛果, ジョシュア・フォーゲル)
Konrad M. Lawson (konrad at lawson.net), web technician (林蜀道, コンラッド・ローソン)

Note: I have announced the availability of the full archive of back-issues here before, but now we are restarting the journal and accepting new submissions.

Starting a new year

As is something of a tradition here, these are my syllabai for the upcoming semester.

East Asia

Early China

Honors College Unit C on bronzes and classical China

Nothing here is terribly new, other than the bronzes thing.  The Early China thing may change a bit as the Chinese Text Project continues to develop, and it becomes easier to give them chunks of primary sources that you pick out without having to make them spend a lot of money.

Meet the meat

Foreigners have two contradictory images of “Chinese men”. One is the effeminate scholar with long fingernails and the other is the kung fu dude. This actually parallels real Chinese culture pretty well, where there has long been a tension between literati culture and the world of rivers and lakes.
Lu Buwei11 4/4 has a nice story to illustrate both literati fascination and contempt with the heroic redressers of wrongs..

Among those fond of bravery in Qi, there was one man who lived in the eastern part of the city and another who lived in the western part. Eventually they met on the road and said, “Shall we have a drink together?” After several rounds, they said, “Shall we look for some meat?” One of them said, “You are meat and I am meat. Why should we go seek meat elsewhere?” They thereupon soaked each other in sauce, then pulled out their knives and ate one another, stopping only when they had fallen over dead. It would be better to lack bravery than to practice this sort of bravery.

not much else to say, really.

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