The New York Times has published three reviews of new Chinese works in translation: Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong (pen name for Lu Jiamin) and Mo Yan, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. What binds these works together, in particular, is that all three are — at least in part — about the experience of the Cultural Revolution.
Some time ago Stefan Landsberger1 sent me some images of propaganda posters from the War with Japan. I have not blogged about them as yet due to laziness, but a couple are very appropriate as classes wind down.
This is one of the advantages of having a blog. Cool people with all sorts of interesting stuff send it to you. If you have not been to Stefan’s Chinese Propaganda Poster site you really should ↩
I hear through the grapevine that the organizers of Otakon, the huge anime/manga/pop culture convention held every in August in Baltimore, are looking for academic papers and panels on East Asian art, history, and culture to round out their offerings. Interested parties should contact Omar Jenkins, Head of Programming.
I reported in my recent posting on the Korean National Archives that online registration for the site is broken for all non-Koreans.
This is unfortunate since the National Archives advertises that it is for “everyone” to use. Registration online is required for many of the services provided, including the printing of online documents (which in any case, seems to be broken), and the online requesting of materials and reservations for visits (not necessary, you can go directly there, but this feature was also broken when I tried it with Windows and Internet Explorer).
After reporting this problem to archivists at both the Daejeon and Seoul offices of the National Archives, they appear to have made it possible for foreigners to register. The original English language page (broken) that I reported on seems to have disappeared. Here’s how to register if you are not Korean:
1. Go to the new membership registration page here. You can also reach the page by going to the homepage for the Korean National Archives and pressing 회원가입 in the navigation bar.
2. Press 동의 for the licensing agreement
3. Next you will be presented with a screen that asks you to enter the citizen registration number that Koreans have but foreigners don’t. While there is nothing on this page that suggests this is possible, you do not have to enter anything into the fields for the name or registration number. Simply press the 다음에하기 button and fill out the form on the next page with you personal information and press 확인 when you are done.
Jeremiah Jenne over at Jottings from the Granite Studio1 will be hosting an Asian history carnival sometime during the week of May 5th. If you have postings you would like to nominate for the carnival, please send them directly to Jeremiah. You can reach him at jgjenne at ucdavis.edu. Another way to submit nominations is to tag it on del.icio.us with the tags ahcarnival for regular blog postings or ahresources for Asian history related online resources.
The site is currently down, but Jeremiah will work to get it back up for next week ↩
Jeremiah Jenne over at Jottings from the Granite Studio1 will be hosting an Asian history carnival sometime during the week of May 5th. If you have postings you would like to nominate for the carnival, please send them directly to Jeremiah. You can reach him at jgjenne at ucdavis.edu. Another way to submit nominations is to tag it on del.icio.us with the tags ahcarnival for regular blog postings or ahresources for Asian history related online resources.
The site is currently down, but Jeremiah will work to get it back up for next week ↩
Jeremiah Jenne over at Jottings from the Granite Studio1 will be hosting an Asian history carnival sometime during the week of May 5th. If you have postings you would like to nominate for the carnival, please send them directly to Jeremiah. You can reach him at jgjenne at ucdavis.edu. Another way to submit nominations is to tag it on del.icio.us with the tags ahcarnival for regular blog postings or ahresources for Asian history related online resources.
The site is currently down, but Jeremiah will work to get it back up for next week ↩
CDT has a list of the keywords that Chinese internet censors are looking for and banning. This is an old list from 2004,1 but some new words have been added lately, like 家乐福 (Carrefour) Most of it is stuff you would expect, anything about Mao or the party or Tiananmen or TI or the other TI. Lots and lots of words having to do with sex. I found a few of them puzzling. 东北独立|东 (northeastern independence)? 四川独立|四 (sichuan independence)? Were they just looking ahead, or are there actual SI and DI movements to worry about?
and only for QQ ↩
Shanghaist among others reports on Asia’s growing rice crisis. Well, actually it’s only a crisis if you are trying to live on less than a dollar a day. Much of the world is trying to do this of course, which has led to rice riots. For historians rice riots call up lots of associations. Although the modern neo-liberal state does not much concern itself with guaranteeing the food security of its people lots of pre-modern states did, and the Chinese Late Imperial state in particular was obsessed with stabilizing the price of grain, hence the ever-normal granaries. A lot of Asian states are currently trying to find ways to up grain production for next year, banning exports of grain, fixing prices and scrounging around for extra supplies. There has been a fair amount of popular violence, in the long tradition of food riots, which are usually focused on forcing sales at a “fair” price or preventing exports of local supplies. In America Sam’s Club is limiting rice purchases. No doubt this will make the W.T.O. grumpy, since we should be entering the glorious era of the universal free market.
Free markets vs. paternalism/meddling is often presented as one of the big traditional/modern dichotomies. Actually, even in China officials have a long history of relying on market mechanisms to deal with food problems. Although Confucian officials have long had a reputation in the West for being anti-commercial this not very accurate. According to Rowe1
Qing provisioning policy might be divided into the following five strategies (listed
in roughly ascending order of controversiality): (1) attacking extravagance and encouraging frugality, on the part of both government and society; (2) encouraging increased food production; (3) promoting maximum commercial circulation of grain;(4) attempting to meet sporadic and localized food crises through administrative means; and (5) maintaining large permanent stocks of grain in government hands as leverage to control local availability of grain on a routine basis. …
Chen Hongmu did not see encouraging commerce as betraying the classical tradition as he showed in his letter to Fang Bao
“The pervasive dilemma today is that the price of rice is high and the people are too
poor to afford it. But if those who seek to deal with this lack an overall conception of
the problem, they will never be able to come up with a comprehensive policy approach
to resolve it. This overall concept is none other than the Way of Producing Wealth
[shengcai], identified in the Great Learning and repeated by Mencius: “Open the well-
spring and restrict its flow [kaiyuan jieliu}” [i.e., produce more and consume less].”
Chen Hongmu was Qing China’s chief provincial-level troubleshooter felt that the most important method of dealing with famine was “relief through commercial circulation”. One of his main concerns was avoiding any state or private action that would cut off the flow of grain. Rowe emphasizes his reliance on market forces. For instance in 1743 when dearth occurred in Jiangxi he dealt with the situation by loaning a large sum of state money to pawnshops, in other words pumping more liquidity into the commercial economy, much as the American Federal Reserve would do today. As Rowe points out “however ‘liberal’ such promarket policies might appear, there were by no means laissez-faire. The objective was less one of letting the market accomplish its task than of making it do so” (p.162) He was certainly a moralizer and willing to nag (or force) people to stop wasting land on tobacco or grain on alcohol. He was also very big on encouraging increased production and such. Chen did not share the modern world’s market idolatry, nor was he willing to question the Confucian imperative to care for the poor.
So how would Asia’s current responses to the rice crisis rate with Chen Hongmu? Any comments from readers would be welcome as I am not following this as closely as some, but it seems that China is taking a pretty free-market approach, not doing anything radical2 and assuming that they have enough cash on hand to maintain a low price on rice. China, at least, seems to have moved a bit beyond the historical phase where states worried about grain supplies.
UPDATE
Here is an angle I had not thought of. Sexy Beijing has been interviewing Chinese consumers about increasing prices. They also talk to some shopkeepers who are finding business off. One woman then interviewed at the end of the clip below said that if the dofu-selling business keeps getting worse she may go back home and return to farming. Chen Hongmu was alway worried about famine causing peasants to flee the land, but this price increase may have the opposite effect.
Rowe, William. Saving the World: Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century China. Stanford University Press, 2001. ↩
China has not restricted rice exports, but they were not a top exporter anyway ↩
China Beat has a nice post up linking to some teaching resources. Although they list some really good resources that you should all go look at they leave out the the best part of the Asia Society page, which is AsiaFood. Besides being a good on-line cookbook it lets you search based on what ingredients you happen to have on hand and recommends things.
I’m pleased to announce the publication by Shinsensha of the translated version of Japanese Diasporas, ｼﾞｬﾊﾟﾆｰｽﾞﾃﾞｲｱｽﾎﾟﾗ, 足立伸子 （編著), including my article “一八八五～九四年の移住者への訓示.” 1 I learned, in the process of writing this post, that my article (in the English language edition) is actually cited and used correctly on the Wikipedia Japanese Diaspora page: “The Japanese Government was keen on keeping Japanese emigrants well-mannered while abroad in order to show the West that Japan was a dignified society, worthy of respect.” I may have to revise my opinion of wikipedia, after all.
In other news, Manan Ahmed sent me this Japanese Robot video, and while watching it I was struck by the realization that the early modern Japanese robots are based on a much older Japanese technology: Bunraku puppets. In this video, for example, you can see a demonstration of how the facial features are manipulated.
Professional Question: Is the translation listed as a separate publication on the c.v.? If so, do you note that it is a translation of an earlier publication? If not, do you just list it under the original publication: “published in translation as….”? ↩
The relationship between Korean martial arts and Japanese martial arts is usually a touchy one. This is because, like the history of so many other things in modern Korea, it is susceptible to what I like to call the “Colonial Death Touch.”
The Colonial Death Touch works like this. Any practice which can be demonstrated to have its origins in the Japanese colonial period, was reborn during the colonial period partly out of inspiration or imitation of some Japanese practice, or was significantly influenced by similar Japanese practices is ruled to be inauthentic. Inauthentic things, of course, cannot be authentically Korean, and thus risk, at the very least, losing its place in the national cultural or historical repository. At most, it can destroy any popularity such practices might enjoy.
The Colonial Death Touch is sometimes delivered by, for example, Japanese nationalists who want to anger their Korean neighbors. However, it is also often used domestically. For example, practitioners of Korean martial art X might claim that they are superior to martial art Y because they are “pure” Korean while martial art Y is soiled by its evil Japanese roots. I’m sure many readers familiar with Korean martial arts can think of some examples of this.
These sorts of exchanges, whoever their participants might be, are silly childish games of nationalist mudslinging. They depend on a simplistic idea of authenticity, a laughable faith in cultural uniqueness, and a conception of the colonial period as cultural and economic black hole out of which only the bright shining light of Korean national resistance can possibly shine.
One martial art that became popular during the colonial period which remained popular in the postwar period is 검도(劍道, J: Kendō) or swordsmanship. In recent years, perhaps partly due to the ever present threat of the colonial death touch, the martial art has undergone some degree of “Koreanization” while other innovations in technique, uniforms, etc. probably are more simply attributable to the evolution of all such arts across time.
Reaching back to the time of liberation in 1945, however, I did find it remarkable that 검도 seemed to remain particularly popular among the Korean police. Like the popularity of Kendo among the Japanese police down to this present day, Korean police publications from the late 1940s and 1950s show pictures of 검도 practitioners gathered in huge numbers. This is somewhat surprising since the sword of the police in the colonial period was one extremely hated symbol that often gets mentioned in anti-police newspaper articles. The post-Liberation police stopped carrying the sword after a reform of November 8, 1945 and replaced it with a police stick. Admittedly, one could argue that the symbolic weight of a sword carried is different from that of the bamboo 죽도(竹刀 J: Shinai) used by 검도 practitioners, but I find the resilience of 검도 to be impressive and admirable all the same. Others, however, might point to this as yet another expression of the “pro-Japanese” tendencies of the police.
It is not surprising to learn that many Korean police during the colonial period were also working hard at various martial arts. In a 1938 Japanese imperial government report on the colonial police, there is an interesting table listing the number of Japanese and Korean police holding various degrees of skill in three martial arts: Judo (유도), Kendo (검도), and Kyudo (궁도, Japanese archery).1 The degrees are listed by dan beginning with shodan (in some martial arts this is often now called the first degree “black belt”). Below are the number of police holding first degree or higher in the three martial arts for 1938:
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日帝下 戰時體制期 政策史料叢書 第67卷 警察과 思想統制 4(昭和13年 警務要覽 外) p.45 (40 in original report) ↩
Yang Liu , a Beijing artist trained in Germany, comments in a series of banners on the differences between Chinese and German culture. Ms. Yang’s Website is here: http://www.yangliudesign.com/
The German is in blue, on the left, the Chinese in red, on the right, continued beyond the “more” marker!
I was thinking about whether to even attempt a contribution to the latest symposium on the role of historical animosities — and their appeasement — in present political tensions when a holiday happened: Passover, the Jewish celebration of the Exodus from Egypt. On the first evening, we celebrate the Seder — literally “order” — a process of remembrance and celebration. But there are elements of sadness: in the midst of telling the story, we spill wine from our cups in honor of the plague-suffering of the Egyptians. Before the Seder even begins, first-born Jews refrain from eating and drinking from sunrise, in remembrance of the first-born Egyptians slain in the final plague. It’s an odd practice, historically, nearly unprecedented: a deliberate rehumanization of “the enemy” enshrined at the heart of what is, arguably, the most centrally Jewish celebration of the ritual year.
I’m not entirely sure that it helps, since there never was an historical reconiciliation between the ancient Israelites and the Pharonic Egyptians.1 But I think it is an important “Zeroth” condition to add to Valérie Rosoux’s Four Conditions:
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Then there’s the question of the historicity of the biblical narrative…. ↩
I just came back from a day at the Korean National Archives headquarters in Taejŏn (Daejeon) and thought I would share some details of the experience in case someone comes across this posting who will be making the trip down there at some point in the future. I also plan to get around to making a detailed entry on the East Asian Libraries and Archives wiki. Read on for the meat.
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