China/Current Events/Historiography

Appel de Blois

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

European historians are appealing for support in resisting laws that will criminalize historical inquiry. You can find the text of their appeal and a link to an article by Timothy Garton Ash giving some of the context here. From Ash:

Among the ways in which freedom is being chipped away in Europe, one of the less obvious is the legislation of memory. More and more countries have laws saying you must remember and describe this or that historical event in a certain way, sometimes on pain of criminal prosecution if you give the wrong answer. What the wrong answer is depends on where you are. In Switzerland, you get prosecuted for saying that the terrible thing that happened to the Armenians in the last years of the Ottoman empire was not a genocide. In Turkey, you get prosecuted for saying it was. What is state-ordained truth in the Alps is state-ordained falsehood in Anatolia.

I have some quibbles with some of what Ash says elsewhere in his article, which I will discuss in a later post, but I urge our readers to read and sign the appeal, which I reproduce below in English and in  Chinese translation.1

布卢瓦呼吁书

为批准布卢瓦呼吁书(Appel de Blois) ，敦请阁下发送电子邮件至contact@lph-asso.fr，署上您的姓名，并写上“read and approved”( 已阅，同意) 。所有人都有权签署呼吁书。学者们请注明所任教的大学，其他人请注明本人住址。

自2005年起，争取历史研究自由(Liberté pour l’Histoire) 一直致力于反对各立法机关采取的将过去治罪的动议，这些立法行动为历史研究设置了愈来愈多的障碍。2007年4月，欧州部长会议采纳的一个框架性决定将这个原本仅限于法国国内的问题变成了一个具有国际影响的问题。这个决定使用无可争议的和必要的反对种族主义和反犹主义的名义，在整个欧盟范围内设置了一些新的罪行，对历史学家设定了与他们的职业要求相违背的禁令。在2008年布卢瓦历史学大会(Historical Encounters) 召开之际，争取历史研究自由邀请阁下批准下列决议：

我们对以溯及既往的道德评判来对待历史和对思想进行限制的做法深感忧虑，为此我们呼吁欧洲历史学家行动起来，呼吁政治家们做出明智的决定。

历史学不能成为当代政治的奴隶，也不能因循竞争记忆发出的指令而写就。在一个自由的国家里，没有任何政治权威有权来界定历史真相和以法律惩罚的威胁来限制历史学家的研究自由。我们呼吁历史学家们在各自国家中集合起他们的力量，创办起与我们类似的组织机构，在目前则先以个人名义签署这份呼吁书，以制止这场旨在控制历史记忆的立法运动

我们提请各国政府注意，在它们需要对维护共同记忆负责的同时，它们决不应该通过法律的形式和针对过去来建立起一种官方真理，这种做法一旦付之法律实施，将会给历史学行业乃至整个思想自由带来十分严重的后果。在一个民主国家中，争取历史研究的自由就是争取所有的自由。

In order to approve the “Appel de Blois”, send an e-mail to contact@lph-asso.fr, give your first and last names and write “read and approved”. Everyone is entitled to give its signature. Academics should add their university and others their residency.

Since 2005 Liberté pour l’Histoire has fought against the initiatives of legislative authorities to criminalize the past, thus putting more and more obstacles in the way of historical research. In April 2007, a framework decision of the European Council of Ministers has given an international dimension to a problem that had until then been exclusively French. In the name of the indisputable and necessary suppression of racism and anti-Semitism, this decision established throughout the European Union new crimes that threaten to place on historians prohibitions that are incompatible with their profession. In the context of the Historical Encounters of Blois in 2008 dedicated to “The Europeans”, Liberté pour l’Histoire invites the approval of the following resolution :

Concerned about the retrospective moralization of history and intellectual censure, we call for the mobilization of European historians and for the wisdom of politicians.
History must not be a slave to contemporary politics nor can it be written on the command of competing memories. In a free state, no political authority has the right to define historical truth and to restrain the freedom of the historian with the threat of penal sanctions.
We call on historians to marshal their forces within each of their countries and to create structures similar to our own, and, for the time being, to individually sign the present appeal, to put a stop to this movement toward laws aimed at controlling history memory.
We ask government authorities to recognize that, while they are responsible for the maintenance of the collective memory, they must not establish, by law and for the past, an official truth whose legal application can carry serious consequences for the profession of history and for intellectual liberty in general.
In a democracy, liberty for history is liberty for all.

  1. Thanks to Wang Xi for his assistance with the translation ↩

Academia/Historiography/Japan/Medieval/Teaching

The Soul of Japan

Posted on by Morgan Pitelka / 8 Comments

I’m teaching a survey course on premodern Japanese history this semester. It focuses on medieval and early modern Japan, and I wanted the first paper to deal with a big question in the secondary literature and the second paper to deal with a similarly big issue by looking at primary documents (in translation). After perusing a range of materials, I decided to assign Donald Keene’s recent book Yoshimasa and the Silver Pavilion: The Creation of the Soul of Japan (Columbia University Press, 2003). The book is readable in its narrative and straightforward in its method, such as it is. The central argument of the work is stimulating but impossibly large. The New Yorker, surprisingly, put it best in its brief capsule review:

This enterprising account by the doyen of Japan studies demonstrates that the quintessential Japanese aesthetic—which characterizes Noh drama, sand gardens, monochrome ink painting, shoji panels, tatami floors, and the tea ceremony—was the creation of a staggeringly incompetent fifteenth-century shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimasa. His military record was dismal and his domestic life a shambles: his domineering wife abandoned him, his nanny (who probably doubled as his mistress) may have intrigued against him, and a favorite concubine took up with his dissolute son. While warfare destroyed Kyoto and the corpses of famine victims clogged the Kamo River, Yoshimasa squandered his treasury, bringing obsessive perfectionism to such matters as perfume blending. He ultimately abdicated to become a Buddhist priest, devoting himself to the development of the restrained, Zen-influenced style exemplified in his famous Silver Pavilion. Keene’s multifarious learning and engaging manner illuminate the improbable story of the fastidious aesthete whose taste has been so important in forming the look of the modern world.

I asked my students to evaluate Keene’s proposition that the Silver Pavilion and its associated cultural practices represented the “soul of Japan.” Because we hadn’t yet studied late medieval or early modern Japan, I asked them to assess the argument in the context of fifteenth-century Japan, and the results were quite varied. Some were outraged that any scholar would claim that the cultural practices of the shogun and the capital’s aristocrats–even with their occasional plebeian origins and some signs of dissemination into the provinces–could be lifted up as the soul of anything other than elitism. Others dismissed all these cultural endeavors as Chinese imports that would only become Japanese with time. A few were regular Keene cheerleaders. One really stopped me in my tracks by noting that though Keene is happy to juxtapose Yoshimasa’s political failures with his cultural successes, he doesn’t ask the obvious question about the ramifications of this odd marriage of influence and abjection: does it matter that Keene’s soul of Japan is founded on staggering incompetence? Isn’t that worrisome?

Keene’s book is aimed at a popular readership and like most of his work avoids explicit theoretical questions, and in fact most engagement with secondary literature in English and Japanese, which is unfortunate. We do need a detailed, scholarly study of the Ashikaga shoguns and their cultural production in English. Still, I like the fact that the text is completely accessible to undergrads, unlike most publications on medieval Japan, with their panoply of specialized terminology and untranslated Japanese terms and titles. Keene has done us a favor by writing a book that opens some big questions about the nature of political failure and patronage in medieval Japan without really closing any doors. Maybe this book, with its lively depiction of a period that is less and less studied not just in undergraduate classrooms but in graduate seminars, will help bring more people back to the study of premodern Japan.

China/English/Teaching

What to do with temples?

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 6 Comments

Another in our occasional series on teaching aids. One aspect of Chinese modernization that most teachers mention is the modernizing state’s need for buildings to house schools, government offices and such. They also had a need to get rid of temples and other aspects of the backwards old society. Given that the basic architectural structure of all these was the same (connected courtyards) it was easy to toss out the Buddhas and turn buildings into something useful. Here is a nice picture to illustrate this.

This is a cool picture for two reasons. First, this temple has been converted into an industrial cooperative by Rewi Alley’s Gong Ho (Work Together) organization. I always like Gong Ho, since it is one of the few Chinese phrases to have come into English. It is a common phrase in the Marines, and there used to be a gun nut magazine called Gong Ho. I’m going to guess that the people who read Gong Ho did not know that the phrase came from a homosexual New Zealand Communist.

Second, this image is from Graham Peck’s Two Kinds of Time, which I am happy to see is coming out in a new edition. The book is a travelogue of Peck’s trips through West China in 1939-40, and I highly recomend it. Peck, Graham. 2008. Two Kinds of Time. University of Washington Press.

Books/China/English

Invisible Books – Might Have Been Written But Never Were

Posted on by C. W. Hayford / 1 Comment

The Italian writer Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is a dreamy fabulation on cities that Marco Polo might have visited – if only they had existed. Of course, Marco calmly reported in detail to Kublai Khan on these “invisible” cities.
Last year we speculated about Five Things That Didn’t Happen (But Might Have), so in the same vein, let’s look at books that somehow never appeared.
Apologies for the quite different natures of these books, but maybe this will get you all thinking of nominations of your own.

1. Zhou Enlai’s Memoirs.

Mao’s thoughts might seem more alluring, but I doubt that he was as self-aware as his #2. Zhou, who I wrote briefly about last year, was in a dependent position, requiring him to watch and react rather than simply striking out without fear of consequence. And you thought that the memoirs of Mao’s doctor were a bombshell!
The memoirs of second level figures are sometimes more observant, partly because they had more time and had to observe and explain things to themselves. But beware the forged memoir. In 1913 China experts welcomed the Memoirs of Li Hung-chang, “edited” by William Mannix, which soon were exposed as complete forgeries (we could devote a separate post to this genre).

2. Archeological Report on Qin Shihuang’s Tomb.

There will be multiple volumes. Most of us realize that the “underground army” is guarding the approaches to the tomb rather than being in it, and that the tomb itself has not been opened. The reason for not opening the actual tomb is, we are told, that the authorities want to wait until the technology is available which will preserve the contents, and I have not seen a schedule. But this will be big.

3. Lloyd Eastman’s biography of Jiang Jieshi.

This is the saddest of my nominations. Lloyd was a friend and most helpful colleague, and it happens that I was his leave replacement the year he was diagnosed with the brain tumor which killed him (this was the year I met Alan Baumler). Lloyd’s project that year was to push forward his work on the biography he had been preparing for more than a decade. His honesty was obvious to archivists and scholars in both Taiwan and the PRC, and he had earned their confidence to the point where he could get access to documents and records which other scholars had not seen and perhaps still have not seen. He decided to use his remaining time to edit the memoirs of Jiang’s second wife, Chen Jieru: Chiang Kai-Shek’s Secret Past : The Memoir of His Second Wife (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993).

Jiang is in many ways harder to place historically than any other important modern political figure and more caught in political jousting. Jonathan Fenby’s Chiang Kai Shek: China’s Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost (Da Capo Press, 2005) is well done indeed, but Lloyd’s full bore political biography would have been a major change in the field.

4. The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.

In “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” Jorge Luis Borges describes “a certain Chinese Encyclopedia,” in which it is written that animals are divided into:
1. those that belong to the Emperor, 2. embalmed ones, 3. those that are trained, 4. suckling pigs, 5. mermaids, 6. fabulous ones, 7. stray dogs, 8. those included in the present classification, 9. those that tremble as if they were mad, 10. innumerable ones, 11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, 12. others, 13. those that have just broken a flower vase, 14. those that from a long way off look like flies.

5. Everything I Know About China.

It is told that the wisest of the early twentieth century British China Hands, long time China resident and diplomat, had on his desk, bound in exquisite red Moroccan leather, a thickish volume entitled “Everything I Know About China.”
When the visitor opened it, of course, every page was blank.

China/Classics/English/Foreign Views/Japan/Pigs

A Blog Post Upon Roast Pig

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 2 Comments

I was reading a discussion of progressive economics at Progressive Historians and was stopped dead in my tracks by a quote from Henry George

There is a delusion resulting from the tendency to confound the accidental with the essential—a delusion which the law writers have done their best to extend, and political economists generally have acquiesced in, rather than endeavored to expose—that private property in land is necessary to the proper use of land, and that to make land common property would be to destroy civilization and revert to barbarism.

This delusion may be likened to the idea which, according to Charles Lamb, so long prevailed among the Chinese after the savor of roast pork had been accidentally discovered by the burning down of Ho-ti’s hut—that to cook a pig it was necessary to set fire to a house.

I love the analogy, but the reference to it being a long-standing Chinese belief seemed absurd, the kind of offhand “aren’t these exotic people a useful way to demonstrate irrationality” storytelling which was so popular at one time.

It wasn’t too hard to find the original essay by Charles Lamb, a critical figure in English letters who I’m fairly sure I’ve never heard of: “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pork.” The essay begins
Continue reading →

China/Databases/English/Historiography/Web Sites and Resources

Living With Wikipedia (China Beat) and Social Bookmarking

Posted on by C. W. Hayford / 2 Comments

China Beat asked me to pull together some thoughts on “WIKIPEDIA, the Free Encyclopedia.”

With help from several friends, including Alan Baumler and Konrad Lawson, I posted “Living With Wikipedia: It’s Here to Stay” (October 7, 2008). I invited comments here at Frog, though, and we would welcome tricks, thoughts, or indignant denuncations.

If I have set this link right (which is a big “if”), Chayford Wikipedia bookmarks will take you to my Delicious bookmarks. This is better than searching Delicious for “Wikipedia,” which gives you 529,036 hits. I don’t want to think about how many hits you would get Googling “Wikipedia.”

Speaking of Delicious (formerly Del.icio.us), it’s one of the social bookmarking sites (the link is to the Wikpedia article). Delicious describes itself as “a social bookmarking service that allows you to tag, save, manage and share Web pages all in one place. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.”

In other words, it’s a cousin of Wikipedia. Whether Delicious too is “here to stay” is another question. By now, searching Delicious generally gives you an overwhelming number of hits. Maybe there’s a better way of handling the problem of sorting and classifying websites.

Continue reading →

Drama/Film

St Sebastian Redux

Posted on by C. W. Hayford / 0 Comment

At Danwei, a blog you must follow to keep up with China, “Donnie Yen Meditates on Violence” shows the Hong Kong movie star posed as the martyred Saint, looking like a pin cushion. This is an homage to the classic Esquire cover showing Mohamed Ali in the same pose.

But of course, Yukio Mishima earlier made a link. In his 1948 novel Confessions of a Mask, the presumably autobiographical character views a painting of St. Sebastian as an inspiration. Mishima struck this pose in a publicity photo for his film

St. Sebastian has a vast iconography, but this painting by Guido Reni was Mishima’s model:

Galleria di Palazzo Rosso (Genova, Italy).

St. Sebastian has become a gay icon, but I’m not sure that either Mohamed Ali or Donnie Yen mean to get involved.

China/Current Events/English

Chinese Rough Music

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 5 Comments

China Beat has a post up from Kate Merkel-Hess on the latest evolution of the “human flesh search engine”, which can be described as Chinese netizens tracking down and harassing (both on the net and in real life) those who offend them either by being ostentatiously rich or insufficiently patriotic or whatever. Merkel-Hess looks at Tim Brook’s Confusions of Pleasure and compares this to the reactions to commercially-fueled insecurity in the Ming. While that is a fine comparison, I think we might also look at the Search Engine as an example of rough music.

Rough music is a concept mostly associated with E.P. Thompson.1 Thompson defines it as “a rude cacophony, with or without more elaborate ritual, which usually directed mockery or hostility against individuals who offended against certain community norms.” The ritual varied a lot, but usually included a mob and lots of noise, the malefactor being carried out of town on a pole (riding the stang) burning someone in effigy, a mock hunt and/or reciting rhymes, often obscene.

If the gun should happen to miss
We’ll scald him to death with a barrel o’ red-hot piss”

Those punished might be guilty of some sort of commercial fraud or failure to support their fellow workers, but enforcing sexual boundaries was also common, especially against women who overstepped their bounds.

It is but a riding, used of course
When the old grey mare’s the better horse;
When o’er the breeches greedy women
Fight, to extend their vast dominion

Although these punishments were not imposed by the state they have a complex relationship with official power. In the sexual cases the masses were enforcing rules that might have once been enforced by the church. Their rituals were often parodies of state actions and also attempted to borrow their power. While the more traditional forms of rough music died out as the close-knit communities who’s judgment they represented vanished bits and pieces of rough music found their way into modern forms of communal violence including “rites of public humiliation practiced during the Cultural Revolution”.

Looking at the search engine as rough music makes some parts of it more understandable. One is that the sheer level of invective hurled at the target is not just a pointless add-on to the ‘real’ punishment, but the main part of the ritual humiliation of the subject. This humiliation is less effective than older forms however, since the humiliation is not face to face, and thus has to be extended into meatspace by some sort of action. This to me makes the purpose of denunciation more the joy or empowerment the denounces get from it. The case Merkel-Hess discusses is a greedy rich young woman who turns out not to have been invented just to be denounced. In the case of rough music most effigies were those of actual people, but here we have a virtual effigy of the spoiled rich girl. And of course she is female, which of course makes her being rich a sexual transgression as well. In the case of denunciation of those who are insufficiently patriotic it is pretty obvious that the search engine is extending the reach of the state, but then by going after the rich they are expressing popular discontent with modernization and state policies.

While Chinese rough music is clearly not part of traditional rural society it is part of a society with lots of web access and lots of people with too much time on their hands and a pretty homogeneous culture. I suspect Thompson will get some cites whenever the first dissertation on the search engine comes out, probably in around 2013

  1. The most google-able description is here all quotes in this post taken from this source ↩

English/General/Historiography/Japan/Pedagogy/Teaching/江戸

A disappointment

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 3 Comments

I’ve been enjoying the textbook I’m using for World History this fall: Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s The World: A History. It covers the entire world in every chapter, and emphasizes ecological and cultural issues which I’ve been trying to slip into my World courses for ages. For the most part, I’m finding it excellent: readable1 , very up-to-date, balanced.

I’m having one conceptual problem with it: the chapters cover a relatively narrow slice of time, in world historical terms, and are topical. Fine: you have to have some organization, and I’m tired of “If it’s Tuesday, this must be Asia.” But the divisions hew more closely to Western conceptions of “era” or “epoch” so that Asian history feels choppy. A little more foreshadowing to indicate that individuals/topics are going to come up again in later chapters would be a blessing, particularly with dynasties like the Ottomans and Ming which last a long time.

And then there’s the eternal problem: eventually, every textbook gets something wrong in your field. From the chapter “States and Societies: Political and Social Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries”:
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  1. He even manages some humor now and then. Discussing the patriarchal social system in early modern Europe he writes, “Widowhood remained the best option for women who wanted freedom and influence. The most remarkable feature of this situation, which might have tempted wives to murder, is that so many husbands survived it.” (p. 643)  ↩

Blog Carnival/General

Asian History Carnival Pt II is Up

Posted on by C. W. Hayford / 0 Comment

Leanne Ogasawara has posted Pt II of the 21st Asian History Carnival at her Tang Dynasty Times.

Although she complains that the blogosphere is in a depression after the Olympics, she presents a number of informative posts from out of the way (to me, at least) venues, including a significant series from Hong Kong.

By the way, Tang Dynasty Times is well worth following. Leanne, among other topics, follows the seasons as expressed in Japanese culture. The Autumn Moon, for instance, is an evocative run down on the Mid Autumn Festival.

China/English

21st Asian History Carnival Pt II Now Posted

Posted on by C. W. Hayford / 0 Comment

Leanne Ogasawara has posted Pt II of the 21st Asian History Carnival at her Tang Dynasty Times.

Although she complains that the blogosphere is in a depression after the Olympics, she presents a number of informative posts from out of the way (to me, at least) venues, including a significant series from Hong Kong.

By the way, Tang Dynasty Times is well worth following. Leanne, among other topics, follows the seasons as expressed in Japanese culture. The Autumn Moon, for instance, is an evocative run down on the Mid Autumn Festival.

Authors/Books/China/English/Foreign Views/Gender/Historiography/Translation

Pearl Buck's Intriguing Staying Power: Imperial Woman

Posted on by C. W. Hayford / 4 Comments

Parade Magazine (September 14, 2008) asked Laura Bush what she’s been reading: “The Imperial Woman, by Pearl S. Buck. I picked up this book after returning from the Olympics in Beijing. The story of the last empress of Manchu China is fascinating; I can hardly put it down.”

Now from my point of view, the novel’s interest is for the history of American ideas about China, but Buck’s take on “Old Buddha” is not to be taken lightly and her appeal to the public should be respected as a “teachable moment,” not merely scoffed at.

Over the years, Buck’s staying power has intrigued me. Since I have a contrarian streak, I’ve challenged myself to respect her accomplishments (considerable) while keeping in sight her shortcomings (ditto) and to distinguish the two.1

Moyer Bell Publishers has a number of her books in print, including Imperial Woman. They are nicely printed and reasonably priced, including Buck’s translation of Shuihuzhuan (titled All Men Are Brothers), which is listed at $16.95. The translation is heavy going at first, as you have to get used to the labored diction she developed to reflect Chinese style, but hey, the price is right.

They offer other of her novels which are of topical interest: Dragon Seed (1939), for instance, describes the opening of the Second Sino-Japanese War with gruesome details of the 1937 invasion and occupation of the Yangzi valley. It’s not the first thing to read on the subject, but holds its own as an historical novel. Peony (1948) is set in 19th century Kaifeng and interweaves a reasonably accurate history of the Jewish community there.2

  1. Charles W. Hayford, “What’s So Bad About The Good Earth?,” Education About Asia 3.3 (December 1998): 4-7.  ↩

  2. The Moyer Bell catalogue descriptions of Dragon Seed and Peony, however, are switched with the write ups for other novels. They also quote Kenneth Rexroth praising her “renerding” of Shuihu, which I actually prefer to the perhaps correct but less colorful “rendering.”  ↩

1945-1950/Colonial/Film/General/Korean War/US-Korea

BAKS 2008

Posted on by John P. DiMoia / 5 Comments

     I just returned to SG this past weekend from BAKS (British Association Korean Studies) 2008, and wanted to post as the film panel in particular intersects nicely with something posted earlier this summer.  For those interested in a brief summary of the conference as a whole, please see Philip Gowman’s take at: http://londonkoreanlinks.net/2008/09/12/baks-conference-report-looking-forward-looking-back/.

     To return to the issue of film, the Tuesday afternoon panel (9 / 9) offered a number of interesting film clips, one of which featured two scenes from “Homeless Angels” /  집없는 천사.   To be fair, I would have to see the entire film to say more; but for now, I agree with a basic reading of the film which reads the placement of these Korean orphans in terms of a paternalistic Japanese state and ithe attempted formation of new imperial subjects through tutelage.  The scene I’m referring to specifically in making this claim comes near the close of the film, and features one of the characters saluting / reciting while the Japanese flag is being raised: in effect, the perfomative force of the scene is roughly equivalent to a recruitment pitch.

     The speaker / presenter also raised an interesting point in conjunction with this film–and I want to be careful, as I’m operating here on jet lag, and may be conflating points made across the entire panel–pointing to the recurring popularity of the trope of the displaced orphan, with (1) “Boys Town” featured as one of the earliest films approved and shown by USAMGIK, and with the subsequent appearance of (2) Douglas Sirk’s (1957) “Battle Hymn.” 

     While I’m not comfortable with making sweeping juxtapositions from the standpoint of history–would want to know much more about the circumstances underlying each of the three films before making any links–the loose observation in the previous paragraph does lend itself to some interesting comparative questions.  Namely, what were the economic / social / political / communitarian ideals informing the practice of dealing with refugees (particular orphans) during and in the aftermath of the Korean War?  I’m familiar with an overall take that places New Deal reformers, broadly construed, in Japan and Korea for the respective occupations, but does this suggest potentially that 1930’s American-style social welfare practices were simply mapped onto the issue of dealing with refugees and orphans?  Can we complicate this further with the recognition (see Dan Rodgers and Atlantic Crossings)  that much of the New Deal was informed by an eclectic set of borrowed practices from earlier European practices related to social welfare?

     What I’m fumbling at here, in a none too articulate fashion, are ways of comparing the social welfare practices adopted under USAMGIK (and during the subsequent Korean War), and the comparable practices mobilized under Japanese Imperial authority only a decade or two earlier.  In what ways were Americans attempting to form new subjects of Korean orphans (perhaps new “South Korean” subjects?)–if we put this to the same litmus test as the Japanese Imperium–and how were  American practices distinct / different?  My recollection of images of orphans from the Holt folks (see the historical introduction at the Holt International website, which links the 1955 founding of the organization to Holt’s viewing of a film about Korea) is that they were generally designated as “Korean,” but is this an innocent designation or does it assume a case where half of the peninsula subsumes the whole? 

I’m trying to do this kind of work for medicine now (looking at material and pedagogical changes in medical education pre and post war), and wondering what this might look like in a similar  context.  I also recognize that the question of distingiushing between categories and attributing sources of authority becomes almost hopelessly muddled, as what’s “Japanese” and “American” is rarely clear, and there’s a signficant difference between the offical rhetoric and on the ground practice.

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