Guardian reporter Justin McCurry weighs in with an interesting commentary on Japan’s role in the financial turmoil currently roiling across the globe.Continue reading →
Living With Wikipedia (China Beat) and Social Bookmarking
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.
St Sebastian Redux
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:
St. Sebastian has become a gay icon, but I’m not sure that either Mohamed Ali or Donnie Yen mean to get involved.
Chinese Rough Music
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
A disappointment
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”:
Continue reading →
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) ↩
Asian History Carnival Pt II is Up
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.
21st Asian History Carnival Pt II Now Posted
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.
Pirates!
September 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Again. I was going to do a short bit on the current state of Chinese pirate scholarship1 but Robert Anthony has already done it.
UPDATE
As Beijing Sounds points out, it really should be International Talk Like a Beijinger Day
meaning scholarship on pirates, not pirate copies of scholarly books ↩
Pearl Buck's Intriguing Staying Power: Imperial Woman
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
Charles W. Hayford, “What’s So Bad About The Good Earth?,” Education About Asia 3.3 (December 1998): 4-7. ↩
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.” ↩
BAKS 2008
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.
Collecting Songs
In Imperial China, emperors and other high officials sometimes disguised themselves as commoners and mingled with the ordinary folk to learn what they were really thinking. For essentially the same purpose, a government office in the People’s Republic now collects shunkouliu, or “slippery jingles.”……Uncensored and uncensorable, they are the freest and arguably the liveliest medium in China, even though the government has classified the poems in its own collection as state secrets.
Perry Link has a very brief piece in the Washington Post on collecting songs in China.
Via CDT
"Never the Twain Shall (Track) Meet": Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Olympic Lies
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of the Yale School of Management has a well informed insider’s view of the Olympics, “Olympics Reveal East-West Divide.” (Forbes.com August 20, 2008) which starts with Rudyard Kipling’s classic 1889 “Ballad of East and West“:
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet
‘Till Earth and Sky stand present at God’s great Judgment Seat.
Sonnenfeld argues that the Beijing Olympics demonstrates that Rudyard had it right: “There is more than a duality between East and West inherent in these games; they embody a paradox between the collaborative spirit of global unity and the patriotic spirit of nationalistic competition.”
Beijing offered “flawlessness” and “manufactured perfection” where prior Olympics in Atlanta and Athens “proffered raw authenticity, pluralistic interests, democratic voices and transparent decision-making.” Such flawlessness, though, is exactly what betrays the “real divide between East and West.”
He concludes that perhaps “the sacrifice of individual pleasures for collective achievement is acceptable to the people of China and other Eastern cultures in a way it isn’t in the West.” Since the next Olympics will take us to Kipling’s London, “we are likely to see a return to chaos, confusion, conflict and spontaneous joy.”
Sonnenfeld surely has a point, but like most who quote the Kipling poem, he leaves out the next lines:
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!
Sounds like the Olympics to me.
But what caught my eye is how Sonnenfeld illustrates the argument my piece on “Lies.” (August 28) which talks about the role of concepts such as authenticity, individualism, and well, lies.
My point was that we need to avoid the assumption that others act because of their age old cultural values. At just about the time that he wrote “East is East,” Kipling exhorted the US to “take up the White Man’s Burden” of colonial rule in the Philippines, tipping us off to the racism lurking here. Kipling’s Gunga Din praises the native subaltern: “you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.” This is fine, since Kipling uses the same standard as he uses to judge both the “other” and himself, but not so fine in that the standard is a British standard, that of “manliness.”
I agree, though, when Sonnenfeld explains things in terms of differences in situation, that is, that China is large, newly proud and united nation. This is a reasonable approach (though the particulars can still be debated) rather than insisting on “East” vs. “West,” two units of analysis which are undefinable and lead to self-confirming assertions.
Down with the Xia!
People who have been following the Three Dynasties chronology debate have already seen this article by Li Liu and Hong Xu “Rethinking Erlitou: legend, history and Chinese archaeology” For those who are even more behind on this controversy than I am, the basic issue is over attempts (described here) to create a solid chronology of early Chinese history. It originates out of bluntly nationalistic desires to make early Chinese history as solidly grounded as early Egyptian history. There is nothing wrong with that motivation, of course, but Li and Hong are claiming that the attempt to tie archeological finds to historical texts (and a single narrative of Chinese development) are no longer helpful. Specifically, attempts to fit the Erlitou site (1900 B.C. to maybe 1500 B.C.) into the Xia-Shang chronology are doing more harm than good. The article has the a nice short description of the Eritou site, which is a very important palace and workshop complex that clearly has an important role in understanding Chinese protohistory. However…
“For more than 40 years of excavation at Erlitou, much attention was placed on its ethnic and dynastic affiliations, but little progress has been made. This approach has overshadowed other research orientations, such as craft production, agricultural practic, urban population parameter, and urban-rural interactions. As a result, we know little about the political economy of this first urban center in China.”
I’m not sure how much overall effect this will have, but it is nice to see a firm call to move away from the centralized narrative that has dominated Chinese protohistory for so long.
via aardvarchaeology
The Crazy Guy for Prime Minister, Please
OK, admittedly I am supremely unqualified to write a post about the current prime ministerial vacancy in Japan. I’m a historian who works on the 16th century, not an expert in contemporary politics. And many people have their eyes fixed on the Palin-Biden-Clinton-McCain-Obama slugfest. But this story–Manga-obsessed, Stanford- and SOAS-educated, former Olympic skeetshooter, cement CEO, Catholic, and regular conservative crazy talker Aso Taro is front runner for the job of Prime Minister–is just too interesting to pass by.
Will the man who made Doraemon Japan’s cultural ambassador be king? Too may politicians have entered the race to be sure at this point, but he is at the head of the pack, having previously aimed for the office three times without success and this time apparently claiming the right mix of experience, LDP credentials, and public popularity. Tobias Harris says Aso isn’t the right man for the job, if such a figure even exists, but it seems quite likely that he will end up landing the post (in elections to be held in October or November) according to recent coverage in Japanese newspapers.
Some commentators see recent public discomfort with LDP leadership as a sign that a major political reallignment is imminent, but it just seems hard to imagine. Are the times a-changin’, or will Aso return the government to stability? More importantly, will manga become required reading on unversity entrance exams?
Migration, Nationalism, Empire
Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s recent Japan Focus article, “Migrants, Subjects, Citizens: Comparative Perspectives on Nationality in the Prewar Japanese Empire” is an ambitious attempt to integrate identity, legal and strategic issues related to the problem of citizenship in the context of migrations within and between empires.1 The primary comparative material is to British examples, and students of “empire” as a category will find both familiar and new material to work with. Japan itself had such complicated migratory patterns that it really is a whole class of “comparative” study in itself. Morris-Suzuki pretty much covers the whole gamut: Japanese emigration to Hawai’i, N. America, S. America and Asia; Korean, Chinese and Taiwanese migration under Japanese imperium to places within Japan and within the empire.2
What makes the article particularly interesting, aside from the valiant attempt to clarify the various legal contortions of Imperial citizenship3 , is that it parallels some of the arguments I made in January (and June) — that Japanese attitudes towards emigration and immigration are structured by nationalistic and imperialistic narratives which obscure important aspects and which lay the foundation for current problems with immigrant assimilation. Morris-Suzuki is taking a more legal and strategic approach, noting the various places in which the end of Japan’s Empire left former colonial subjects stranded without citizenship, and the political and diplomatic problems, some of which are still unresolved, and seemingly unresolvable.
Some of these problems clearly should have been solved by the US and allies after WWII: full repatriation of Korean subjects in the Japanese home islands, Sakhalin and Manchuria, for example, would have been entirely appropriate. Or would it? Part of me thinks that the diversity represented by Koreans in Japan should have been a good thing for leavening, a bit, Japan’s self-definition as homogenous, but clearly, if it was supposed to accomplish something with regard to multi-cultural understanding, it’s a gloriously failed experiment. The paper almost invites counter-factual speculation: if the lines had been drawn differently, would there have been a significantly different result? Could Japan, in the early 20th century, have developed a version of Imperial Nationalism which wasn’t racialist, or a citizenship system which wasn’t patriarchal and instrumentalist?4
It also contains a citation to one of my own publications, which is always fun, but it’s on a minor point, and her main discussion of material related to my article comes from other sources. Oh, well. ↩
She does talk about the integration of Okinawans to some extent, but leaves out their anomalous status after WWII. Not a complaint or a criticism, though it does raise fascinating questions. There’s just not enough room in the world to cover everything. ↩
and in this regard, Japan’s koseki family registration system seems to be arguably simpler and more reasonable than several of the British attempts to both authorize and limit the mobility of colonial subjects ↩
there was an article in one of my regular journals recently — AHR, JAS, JJS — which argued that Japan’s Imperium forced it to adopt a more flexible definition of multicultural national identity, but I can’t remember which one and the move has obliterated any organization I had in my journals. I wasn’t terribly convinced at the time, and a large part of my reservation had to do specifically with what Morris-Suzuki highlights: the rhetoric of integration was one-sided and the legal status of colonial subjects was never considered a subject for rectification. ↩