Frog in a Well

Asian History Carnival #19

Posted on February 15, 2008 by K. M. Lawson / 5 Comments

Welcome to the 19th Asian History Carnival here at Frog in a Well – Korea. Below are some of the excellent postings to be found around the web in the last two months or so for anyone interested in Asian history. This time we have an especially large number of China postings to recommend.

Of late, submissions of nominations to the Asian History carnival have been few in coming which is probably partly due to a lack of good and timely advertising but I continue to find that there are a number of places on the web where quality postings related to Asian history can be found.

I am also happy to see that we continue to see new websites which deserve similar praise. The new weblog China Beat: Blogging how the East is Read is an excellent example of this with very high quality material. The site went live in mid-January and includes an impressive list of contributors. Soon after the site went online the historian Kenneth Pomeranz offered a posting for their regular feature “This Day in History” by describing the rise and fall of Wang Mang, reformer and throne usurper and the kinds of patterns in Chinese history which be seen in the career of this figure. Jeff Wasserstrom offered us a list of top-five Shanghai urban legends, including the famous park sign about “Dogs and Chinese” and the idea that Shanghai was a mere fishing village before the Opium wars. Kate Merkel-Hess suggests a list of five Chinese historical events that got more attention. Another posting by Wasserstrom suggests we revisit past moments when East-West exchanges increased and suggests some good reads we might consider.

Another site which has consistently offered high quality history postings which get frequently highlighted in Asian history carnivals is Jeremiah Jenne’s Granite Studio. This is no less true for the last few months. In a series of “Voices from China’s Past” posting we lean about the novelist and playright Lao She, the “household instructions” of the 6th century scholar-official Yan Zhitui, and the role of Yue Fei and Qin Gui and patriotism in the Song dynasty and historiography of the period. Among his “This Date in History” postings we find a description of the Zunyi Conference of 1935 and urges caution in an attempt to evaluate its real impact on the rise of Mao.

Both Granite Studio and our own C. W. Hayford have taken the opportunity to talk about the anniversary of Zhou Enlai’s death, with Jeremiah giving us an overview of some of the memorial images of his life and death. In his posting here at Frog in a Well, Professor Hayford offers us a few more stories about the man’s career and attempts to address some of the questions raised in the original Granite Studio posting.

Zhou Enlai’s death was not the only one to be remembered. Tenement Palm offers us a look at Liang Qichao‘s life and especially the importance of Liang in popularizing Darwinist ideas. Yan Fu, who also made an appearance in the posting just mentioned, is the topic of our own Alan Baumler, in his posting on the reception of Darwin in China, especially through Yan Fu’s On Strength.

Blog postings remembering the deaths of famous figures in Chinese history are joined by a recent posting reminding us that the 50th anniversary of the hanyu pinyin phonetic system just passed on February 11th.

The excellent weblog the Useless Tree continues to give us interesting postings looking at the connections between politics, current events, and Confucian and Taoist ideas. One good recent example includes a discussion of the relationship between Mao and Taoist ideas. The Useless Tree joins Alan here at Frog in a Well in an exchange about teaching Confucius and the debates surrounding the use and authenticity of certain Confucian texts.

Jonathan Benda shares some notes on a talk recently given in Taiwan by the Chinese historian Yang Tianshi on the diaries of Chiang Kai-shek. I added my own thoughts about Yang’s argument here at Frog in a Well.

An article by Robert Townsend in the AHA journal Perspectives which is upbeat on the career prospects of aspiring historians prompted a response at PhDinHistory looking to evaluate the suggestion that things bode well for African, Asian, and Latin American Specialists through a close look at available statistics. See Townsend’s response in the comments.

The famous southern gate 남대문(南大門) of Seoul burnt down last week and a mood of national mourning quickly set in. A posting over at the Marmot’s Hole gives us a closer look at the Gates of Seoul. Also at the Marmot’s Hole are two interesting contributions by Robert Neff, including an interesting article looking at the celebration of Christmas in modern Korea and one on the impact of Korea’s first russian military advisors.

Some other nuggets:

– The Early Tibet blog offers a look at Christianity in Early Tibet and evidence that shows the work of missionaries there and in Central Asia.

– Sepia Mutiny reminds us of FDR’s anti-imperialist goals and Churchill’s recognition of the threat posed to the British empire posed by his friends efforts.

– In the posting over at the Opposite End of China, we are introduced to the Pickle King of Islamistan and the rise and fall of Khalid Sheldrake’s power in Xinjiang.

– Jeremy Goldkorn at Danwei gives us a look at Geremie R. Barmé’s essay comparing the Chinese press now with that in the cultural revolution.

– Our own Alan Baumler suggests that an 11th century poem by Shao Yung can help us understand why many people who may have little reason to support Barack Obama.

– Our own Jonathan Dresner takes Thomas C. Reeves to task on his use of the analogy between Iraq and Korea.

– Guest blogger Sayaka Chatani shares with us a recent article from Sekai on the Chinese Communist Eighth Route Army’s POW policies with the Japanese.

– Jonathan gives us an overview of his panel at the 2008 AHA conference while our Frog in a Well contributor Morgan Pitelka offers two postings on the University of Sydney Japanese History Workshop in December.

Japan Focus

Japan Focus continues to be one of the best places on the web for open access to quality articles on the history of East Asia. While it is impossible to highlight them all, below are a few of the recent articles posted to Japan Focus that I especially enjoyed:

Gyokusai or “Shattering like a Jewel”: Reflection on the Pacific War by Hiroaki SATO looks at the concept of gyokusai, or to die in a beautiful act like a shattered jewel instead of surrendering shamelessly and the evolution of Japanese wartime policies related to it.

The Comfort Women, the Asian Women’s Fund and the Digital Museum by Wada Haruki introduces the Digital Museum, funded by the controversial Asian Women’s Fund dedicated to the preservation of the memory of the sexual slavery endured by the “comfort women” during the war and describes the process of the creation and evolution of the Asian Women’s Fund, which has been criticized by many.

Nikkei Loyalty and Resistance in Canada and the United States, 1942-1947 by Stephanie Bangarth. We have all heard about the fate of the Japanese-Americans during World War II. This fascinating article takes a comparative look at both the wartime and early postwar fate of the Nikkei in Canada.

The Contested Heritage of Koguryo/Gaogouli and China-Korea Conflict by Ahn Yonson gives a wonderful overview of the historical controversy over the ancient kingdom of Koguryo and what is at stake in the nationalist claims of historians in China and Korea. It claims very reasonably that there needs to be much greater appreciation for the “multiple relationships and mutual observations that transcend national, cultural, social and political borders.”

The Forging of Alien Status of Koreans in American Occupied Japan by Mark E. Caprio looks at the creation of the status as “aliens” in occupied Japan of the large Korean minority, the impact of these policies on the behavior of the Koreans in Japan, and the difficulties faced by Koreans in both repatriation and in establishing residence in Japan.

East Asia History Lectures Online

Jeremiah over at Granite Studio posted a series of three talks available online by the recently deceased historian Frederic Wakeman:

Part I: China’s Longue Durée and Mongol Occupation
Part II: Ming Nativism and the Local Turn
Part III: Qing Culturalism and Manchu Identity

This reminds me that there are dozens of interesting lectures available in video or audio format online and, to my knowledge, still no good website which indexes these excellent lectures when they come in from the many diverse places they can be found online. Below are just a few examples of lectures, interviews, and book talks that can be found online of interest to students of Asian history:

Japan’s Colonization of Korea – Alexis Dudden
How the War of Resistance to Japan Made and Unmade China – Rana Mitter
Tea and the Origins of the China Trade – Jonathan Chu
In the Ruins of Empire: Battle for Postwar Asia – Ronald Spector
Marco Polo: Silk Road to China – Larry Bergreen
China’s Return to Tradition: How to Interpret the New Forces Emerging in China – Yu Ying-shih
China Rediscovers its Own History – Yu Ying-shih
A Money Doctor from Japan: Megata Tanetaro in Korea, 1904-1907 – Michael Schiltz
Tibet: Does History Matter – Tsering Shakya (mentioned at Granite Studio here)
Godzilla and Postwar Japan – William Tsutsui
Conversation with Tsuyoshi Hasegawa on “Racing the Enemey: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan”
John Dower on Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor Hiroshima 9/11
Conversations with History: John Pomfret “Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China.”

I believe there is a great need for a good website that can be easily updated which posts links to these kinds of lectures when they become available. As it is now, they can be found only by frequently checking hundreds of university websites, library websites, organizations, youtube, and other locations.

For the time being, I recommend that if you find an online audio or video lecture about Asian history that you give it the del.icio.us tag:

ahlecture

Asian History Resources
For some time here at Frog in a Well we have hosted the East Asian Libraries and Archives wiki, which continues to grow, albeit slowly. However, the web now has a new and potentially much more expansive attempt to create a history archive wiki, this time supported by the American Historical Association. Check out the new AHA ArchivesWiki which is now live. It has already been populated with basic information about dozens of archives in the United States and elsewhere. You can read more at the AHA weblog in a posting by Robert B. Townsend.

Bandô-Sammlung des DIJ (German and Japanese only) – I recently discovered that the website of the DIJ (German Institute for Japanese Studies) in Tokyo hosts an impressive collection of primary documents related to the 板東俘虜収容所 from World War I.

ArchivesOnFlickr – An effort is underway to promote the tacking of photographs of materials from archives on Flickr. Read more about the idea at this ArchivesNext posting. While there are few photos related to Asia so far, this might be worth keeping an eye on.

Classical Historiography for Chinese History – Benjamin Elman has an extensive bibliography on sources, dictionaries, chronologies, and other tools that looks like it would be a must for pre-modern historians.

US “Tiananmen Papers” – The National Security Archive recently made available some US government documents related to the 1989 Tiananmen incident.

Historical materials regarding the Comfort Women Issue – There are a number of historical documents and other PDF documents related to the Comfort Women issue on the digital museum discussed in the Wada Haruki article dicussed above in the section on Japan Focus.

This concludes this Asian History Carnival. The next issue will be in early April and we may have a volunteer to host it. If you are interested in hosting future editions in June, August, or October please send me an email at kmlawson at froginawell.net.

China/English/Intellectual/Qing

Darwin the Confucian

Posted on February 12, 2008 by Alan Baumler / 3 Comments

As today is Darwin Day I thought I would post something on China’s reception of Darwin’s work. He tended to be confused with Spencer at first, and Elman gives some examples of how his work continued to be misunderstood for a very long time. Still, it is not surprising that Chinese tended to see Darwin through Spencer. Spencer was big in the West, and for those obsessed with the survival of nations rather than the survival of species Spencer would seem more to the point. Yan Fu‘s On Strength first appeared in 1895 and was the first serious account of Darwin published in China.

Darwin is an English biologist. Heir to his family’s scholarly traditions, he traveled around the world as a young man, amassing a rich collection of rare and curious plants and animals. After several decades’ exhaustive and subtle reflection upon them, he wrote The Origin of Species. Since the publication of this book, of which nearly every household in Europe and America now has a copy, there has been a tremendous change in the scholarship, politics, and religion of the West. The claim that the revolution in outlook and intellectual orientation occasioned by Darwin‘s book exceeds that of Newtonian astronomy is hardly an empty one.

His book says that for all their diversity, the species originated from a single source and that their differences developed slowly, for the most part in connection with changes in the environment and an abiding biological tendency toward incremental differentiation. Eventually divergence from the remote source led to vast and irreversible differences, but these were brought about by natural processes in later ages and were not inherent in life at its origins.

Two chapters of the book are particularly noteworthy. . . . One is called “Competition” and the other, “Natural Selection.” “Competition” refers to the struggle of things to survive, and “Natural Selection” is the retention of the fit. The idea is that people and things exist in profusion, surviving on what the natural environment provides, but when they encounter others, peoples and things struggle over the means of survival. At first species struggled with species, and when they advanced somewhat, one group (jun) struggled with another.

Not bad, in my opinion, although I think he may overestimate Darwin’s sales figures a bit. At the end of this reading he is already leaving Darwin’s interest in species to look at the competition among “groups.” Here he is pretty clearly influenced by Spencer

Continue reading →

Blog Carnival

Upcoming Asian History Carnival

Posted on February 7, 2008 by K. M. Lawson / 0 Comment

I’ll be posting the 19th Asian History Carnival at Frog in a Well – Korea on the evening of February 14th, Seoul time. Learn more about the Asian History Carnival here.

Nominate posts for the carnival here or use the tag http://del.icio.us/tag/ahcarnival/. If you find useful online resources related to Asian history you can tag them with http://del.icio.us/tag/ahresources

I am also really hoping we’ll get some volunteers to host the next few carnivals. Please send me an email at kmlawson at froginawell.net if you are interested in hosting the next carnival, which will be held, ideally, April 4th, with the next one on June 6th..

Blogs and Carnivals/China

Upcoming Asian History Carnival

Posted on February 7, 2008 by K. M. Lawson / 0 Comment

I’ll be posting the 19th Asian History Carnival at Frog in a Well – Korea on the evening of February 14th, Seoul time. Learn more about the Asian History Carnival here.

Carnivals/Frog in A Well/Korea

Upcoming Asian History Carnival

Posted on February 7, 2008 by K. M. Lawson / 0 Comment

I’ll be posting the 19th Asian History Carnival here at Frog in a Well – Korea on the evening of February 14th, Seoul time. Learn more about the Asian History Carnival here.

China/Economics/Imperialism/Taiwan

Comparative Colonialism-Taiwan

Posted on February 7, 2008 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Japan Focus has a nice article by Anne Booth on Japanese colonialism in Taiwan (and Korea) The standard view is that the post-war development of both places has a lot to do with the economic transformation created under colonialism. Booth compares Taiwan and South Korea to the European colonies in S.E. Asia and finds very little systematic difference. Yes, Taiwan did double its value added in agriculture, and both places were insulated from the Great Depression more than the European colonies, but the Japanese colonies do not consistently stand out. She looks at a lot of other data, but here are her 1938 GDP per capita figures

Philippines 1522

Korea 1459

Malaya 1361

Taiwan 1302

Indonesia 1175

Thailand 826

Burma 749

I don’t have much to say about it, but it is an interesting paper.

Via Michael Turton

English/Events/Literature

Upcoming Events at the Donald Keene Center

Posted on February 6, 2008 by K. M. Lawson / 0 Comment

If you are in New York city in the next few months, you might want to check out the spring schedule for the Donald Keene Center for Japanese culture at Columbia University.

Upcoming Events at the Donald Keene Center — Spring 2008

1. Thursday, 2.7 On the Trail of the Urban Nomad in the Tokyo of the 1980s
2. Wednesday, 2.13 Woman on the Other Shore: An Evening with Mitsuyo Kakuta
3. Friday, 2.22 A Memorial for Edward Seidensticker
4. Thursday, 3.27 Householders: The Reizei Family in Japanese History
5. Monday, 4.7 Japanese Style Shifts and Social Identities: The Case of JFL Learners and their Host Families
6. Wednesday, 4.16 Wartime Diaries by Japanese Writers
7. Friday, 4.18 Translation Prize Ceremony
8. Thursday, 5.1 Reading and Writing Sino-Japanese

Academia/China-Japan/Education/Events/Historiography/Japan/Korea-Japan

“Early Modern” Periodization

Posted on February 5, 2008 by Morgan Pitelka / 5 Comments

I participated in a symposium on February 1st hosted by the USC-Huntington Early Modern Institute, on the topic of early modern periodization in East Asia. It was an exciting event with mostly big-name speakers (I was drafted in as a replacement!) including Kenneth Pomeranz, R. Bin Wong, John Wills Jr., Samuel Yamashita, John Duncan, and Jahyun Kim Haboush. The audience was substantial, prompting the organizers to move us to a much bigger conference room. I counted more than 60 people, implying a great deal of interest in the topic.

It seemed clear from the start that some presenters assumed that “early modern” referred to something real in the histories of Qing, Choson, and Tokugawa Japan, while others saw the term as at most a useful interpretive and comparative tool. The discussion devolved (predictably? unfortunately? amusingly?) into a debate about comparative history. Some participants suggested that using the period “early modern” compromises our ability to study East Asian histories on their own terms, forcing research and analysis into categories invented in certain parts of Western Europe. Others unpacked “early modern” in specific historical and cultural contexts. Still others argued that periodization schemes like “early modern” presented historians of East Asia with the opportunity to engage with historians of Euro-America, to highlight the scanty evidence marshaled in the narrative of the rise of Western modernity, and to move Asia to its rightful place in world history: the center. In my paper on the material heritage of Tokugawa Ieyasu, I made the argument that museums are where much popular education about the early modern takes place, essentially unacknowledged (and, unfortunately, unexamined) by historians of “early modern” East Asia.

In the final discussion of the day, as debate swirled back and forth on this issue, one fact became clear, perhaps winning the argument on the side of the “early modern” doubters better than any grand attempt at persuasion could have done: in the huge crowd of graduate students, scholars, and a few visitors from the general public, only one historian of Europe or America was present, and she was essentially required to be in attendance because of her role in founding and naming the USC-Huntington Early Modern Institute. The hackneyed phrase from the movie “Field of Dreams” comes to mind, except in reverse: even if you build it, they won’t come. In other words, even if a bunch of famous historians of East Asia hold a symposium on a term invented in European history to discuss its broad relevance; even if that event is hosted by an organization dominated by historians of Euro-America; and even if it is held at one of the biggest universities in southern California where lots of historians congregate; they (meaning historians of Euro-America, the group that the comparativists want to engage) won’t come. Of course I care about how badly East Asia is represented in the media, in public education, in much popular culture, and in the writing of many (not all, of course) prominent historians of Europe and America. But if the attendance at this symposium is any indication, adopting this comparative terminology, which often is not a particularly good fit for the diverse regions of the world, is not the answer.

Academia/Japan/Journalism & Mass Media/Journals/Web Sites

Asian Studies Toolbar

Posted on February 5, 2008 by Morgan Pitelka / 3 Comments

A recent exchange on H-Asia mentioned the Asian Studies Toolbar, which I first read about in March of last year when the maker, John Noyce (“a librarian turned writer/historian”), wrote about it on the same list. At the time I was very disappointed to read that it only worked on Windows. However I just successfully downloaded and installed it on Firefox running on my iMac, and it is AMAZING. It allows instant searches of a variety of Asian engines and blog aggreggators, it lists hundreds of Asian academic and popular journals, newspapers, and other sources as live RSS feeds, and it even includes blogs related to Asia – including the three flavors of Frog in a Well. Links to online atlases, image banks, and other sources really make this a useful tool.

China/English/Song

Obama for Minister of the Left

Posted on February 3, 2008 by Alan Baumler / 5 Comments

Some historians have gone so far as to endorse Barak Obama for the office of President of the United States. Lots of people who seem to have very little affinity with the policy positions Obama has advanced on his website find him to be attractive. How can this be? Is not democratic politics a matter of picking the candidate whose policy positions you find most compatible and then voting for them?

Well, yes and no. At least some of choosing a president is choosing a symbol of the nation. Thus the suitably of a candidate to be a flattering self-reflection is also important. Most of the time we Americans select our politicians (if we give the matter any thought at all) on what promises they make and what things they say they will do. The moral qualities of an official are not something we worry about too much. On the other hand, we do occasionally tend to think some politicians are more than just a set of checkmarks on a list of policies¹ but rather symbols of whatever an American is (Kennedy and Reagan come to mind)
Americans seem to have problem with this, as our political language is not well suited to this type of talk. Jounalists do ask, incessantly, the silly question of which candidate you would most like to have a beer with² I think Dukakis ran an ad pointing out that politicians and beer buddies are not the same thing.

In China things are a bit easier, in part because one does not need to worry about electing leaders all the time and in part because traditionally Chinese politics had a lot to do with moral qualities. One of these is friendship, which is both one of the five bonds of Confucianism and crucial to understanding much of Chinese political history. Somebody said that nations do not have permanent friends, only permanent interests, but members of the Chinese elite did have friends. Wyatt talks a lot about the role of friendship in The Recluse of Loyang, a study of Shao Yung (1011-1077) whose political role in the Song centered around his friendship with powerful men and their desire to be friends with a man like Shao Yung. As Shao put it in a 1074 poem

A man mustn’t seek his reflection in flowing water;

He must seek it in water that is still.

Flowing water has no fixed form,

While still water provides a fixed entity.

[But] neither should a man seek his reflection in water [at all].

He should seek his reflection in other men.

Water’s mirror may show a man’s face,

But a human mirror exposes a man’s spirit.

(Wyatt)This poem encapsulates a code that is simultaneously exclusionist and yet immanently social. Shao the recluse could not conceive of passing through life alone; still, he was unwilling to settle for anything less than full perfectibility in his prime relationships.

This should not be taken as an endorsement of Obama by this website, Shao Yung, or myself, but I think this poem does a lot to explain the Obama phenomena. Much better to look in the mirror and see Obama then to see (insert name here.) I suspect that democratic politics in China, if it ever comes to be, will be rather different than that in the U.S.

For Su Fei’s Chinese take on American politics look here.

As Mitt Romney is discovering ↩
Bush, obviously. Being rich he would pay and as he does not drink I would get both beers. ↩

Academia/Diaspora/Japan/Memory/Nationalism

AHA 2008: a very limited perspective

Posted on February 1, 2008 by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

It was a very busy conference for me, but my meetings didn’t leave me a lot of time for panels.¹ None, in fact, except for our own, which was great fun. I did get to do some social stuff, including the Cliopatria/IHE dinner, a visit with the Progressive Historian himself and an evening with a college friend that ended up at a used bookstore (see below).

I did think our panel was quite fun, though a bit limited by the absence of Nathanael Robinson (and his paper). That said, though, I think Alan Baumler and Rebecca Goetz did an excellent job squaring the circle of our presentations, a job that would have been complicated by another thesis. One of the members of the audience was a British grad student who’s doing microhistory in the same regions I studied in Yamaguchi: it was a pleasant, but shocking, experience to realize that I’m not going to be the only person who knows something about this.

My own paper is an outgrowth of thinking about ways to connect the history of Japanese emigration with contemporary Japanese immigration issues. The return migration of Nikkei from Brazil, the Philipines, North America, etc., is a striking case: Japan permits easy remigration of these groups because they are expected to be culturally assimilable in a way that Chinese, Korean or Philippine immigrants wouldn’t be, but the assimilation which has taken place over three or four generations has made that considerably more difficult. Why, then, didn’t Japanese authorities (or the Japanese people in general) realize that assimilation would create culturally distinct Nikkei? My theory is that pre-’45 nationalism obscured the normal patterns of assimilation which take place in multi-generational immigrant communities: certainly, out-migration to Hawai’i and the Philippines was thought of like colonial frontier settlement more than as the transfer of population to a new host culture. Histories of emigration and studies of Nikkei communities by Japanese scholars continued to obscure assimilation by focusing on the way in which traditional values and recreated traditional institutions bolstered the overseas community, taking their successes as evidence of innate Japanese qualities — perseverence, education², cohesion. This is particularly stark when compared with English language histories of immigration, which emphasize assimilation as the very foundation of success in the new host culture, and emphasize efforts at modernization and entrepreneurship.

Manan Ahmed’s paper was much more interesting, a historiography of the tension between conquerers as national heroes and heroic resisters as local icons. The local counternarrative of resistance got very elaborate, as entertaining stories of weaker figures wrecking vengeance on powerful ones often are. Ultimately, as he described it, the heroic invader — heroic from the standpoint of constructing a unified national narrative, anyway — is dehistoricized and turned into an inoffensive (and uninspiring, I’d guess) “unifier” while local resistance is effectively erased from the national narrative.³ In other words, and I don’t remember who said it this way, but someone did, the life is drained out of the biography until the hero becomes “nice.”

I do remember Alan Baumler’s comments drawing the papers together by highlighting their biographical and genealogical aspects, the way in which pre-national figures can be integrated into national self-narratives as ancestors and the way in which shared ancestry can bridge other modern/national divides. The idea that values are inherited through blood is a powerful common error with which we regularly contend. I was just lecturing this week on nationalism, and the way in which it is based on an historical fiction which obscures margins, minorities and migration.⁴ There was some discussion — initiated by Rebecca, if memory serves — about the way in which many nations cleanse their histories by a similar sort of biographical emasculation or justify invasions and other atrocities by a sort of victors’ hagiography.⁵

Continue reading →

In spite of which, I’m in the running for latest conference blogging ↩
There’s a whole research program yet to be undertaken with regard to educational values. The standing assumption, based on the high educational achievements of Nisei, is that there was something inherent in traditional Japanese culture which valued education, which is patently untrue for the rural laborers who make up a large portion of the immigrant population. The successor thesis — that the Meiji emphasis on education and “self-help” was the key factor — assumes a rapid transmission of these ideas from city to country which is a bit hard to accept. The basic question of literacy rates among immigrants versus their sending communities isn’t really clear yet, and a fair examination of the other questions really hasn’t been done. ↩
note some of the similarities to Hiraku Shimoda’s argument ↩
I didn’t use the alliteration in class, but I’m going to have to remember it for next time ↩
I was reminded, though I didn’t get a chance to mention it, of the Enola Gay controversy ↩

1945-1950/Korea

1948.7 – Mission Accomplished

Posted on February 1, 2008 by K. M. Lawson / 0 Comment

I couldn’t help of thinking about a certain speech when I saw this headline in the July 4th, 1948 issue of the The Korean Free Press (자유신문 自由新聞).

Military Operations in Cheju are For the Most Part Completed

In April, 1948 the island of Cheju-do erupted in what became a major uprising that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Koreans, or an estimated 10% of the island’s population. The above article, with its optimistic headline, is found months before the violence reaches its peak, and only a few weeks before troops heading to crush the rebellion themselves rebel in the port town of Yŏsu in October. An article from the same day carrying the same news in the much more conservative newspaper 대동신문 (大東新聞) is even more direct.

Military Operations in Cheju are Complete

1945-1950/Film/Korea/Nationalism

1949 Banning Japanese Subtitles

Posted on February 1, 2008 by K. M. Lawson / 0 Comment

On the second page of the June 25th issue of The Korean Free Press (자유신문 自由新聞) there is a very small article which shows how long the process of eliminating the most outwardly visible elements of “Japanese remnants” (일제잔재) could take. While newspaper articles today continue to point to long lasting legacies of the Japanese colonial period, more than four years after the end of Japanese colonial period legislation and executive orders continued to be used to get rid of some of the more glaring reminders of the recent colonial past, including the use of Japanese subtitles for foreign movies.

The Showing of Movies with Japanese Subtitles will be Prohibited after the End of This Month

That was not the only Japanese remnant to be dealt with in the newspaper on that day in 1949. The newspaper article just above this one reported that 柳混龍, a 43 year old former “Kempei spy” (憲兵密偵) had been arrested in Cheju-do.

China/Republican/Revolution/Taiwan

Taiwanese modernity

Posted on January 28, 2008 by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

One of my colleagues asked me a question about Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Three Times. For those of you who have not seen it, it is a set of three love stories all set on Taiwan with the same two actors, one in 1966, one in 1911 and one in 2005. She had a question about the middle story. In this segment the female lead (Shu Qi 舒淇) works in a fairly high class brothel, and the story revolves around the possibility that Chang Chen (張震) will buy out her contract. He is portrayed as an idealistic young man who is opposed to concubinage and is tied up with the idealistic Mr. Liang (I assume Liang Qichao).My colleague asked me how accurate the movie’s portrayal of Taiwanese politics was. I was a bit stumped by that.

Visually at least it was hard for me to see the middle segment as being Taiwan in 1911. It was all interior shots in the brothel, so I suppose you would not expect to see some of the signs of colonial rule. On the other hand.

-The male lead wears a queue. Would a follower of Liang Qichao outside China in 1911 have done that? I know that in some contexts on Taiwan keeping the queue was a sign of anti-japanese feeling, but obviously cutting it off was a sign of being a radical modernizer, which is what he seems to be. Is this a mistake or was Taiwan different?

-When one courtesan is sold the contract is in Chinese. Would a legal contract have been in Japanese by that point? (I did not see the date on it )

-The only signs of Japanese rule or of any change at all is that the money used to buy the one girl is Japanese-issued money.

I was just bothered by that fact that the whole segment (physically at least) could have been set in 1860 or 1720 for that matter. Both of the other segments had a strong sense of place and time, but not this one. It seemed to me like a timeless “traditional China” with the date of 1911 stuck on it. Did anyone else get this impression, or am I ignorant of the material culture of Colonial Taiwan? Or was there some point Hou was trying to make that I am missing?

1945-1950/Korea

The Stranglehold of Foreign Films in Korea 1948

Posted on January 25, 2008 by K. M. Lawson / 0 Comment

The impact of foreign films on the Korean movie industry is frequently addressed in the Korean media. The Korean government, media, and the industry itself have long debated how many foreign films should be shown in domestic cinemas and the degree to which Korea should or should not open up to cultural products from Japan.

These concerns go back further than I had imagined, as you can see from this cartoon found in The Korean Free Press (자유신문 自由新聞) from Christmas Day, 1948:

In the cartoon the Korean film and theatrical industry is being strangled by “Foreign Movies” and stepped upon by a 10% tax rate.

On the day before this cartoon was published, in the Christmas Eve issue, you can see an advertisement for one of the offending foreign films, the 1946 English movie “The Captive Heart” which opened on that day.

On the day after this cartoon was published, December 26th, the following advertisement for the Korean play “임 오시는 길”, opening at 동양극장 on that day is found alongside a smaller advertisement for the Universal pictures movie, “독개비騷動” (독깨비 소동) which I think is the 1948 film “Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein”

The same page of the Christmas Day issue which carried the initial cartoon also has two other articles more representative of the kinds of issues of the day:

拷問致死事件證人尋問繼續 (Questioning of Witness Continues in the Incident of a Death Resulting from Torture) – Articles on police torture of suspects are found frequently in both conservative and more moderate newspapers in 1948, and are also common throughout the newspapers of the 1945-1949 period I have been looking at.

暴動未然防止：市民은警察信賴하라 (Prevent Violence Before it Happens: Citizens, Trust the Police!) – Articles pleading for people to trust the police are very often found on the same page as articles covering police torture, police corruption, or other problems of police quality (악질경찰 惡質警察).