Academia/Historiography/Japan

Japanese History Workshop, The University of Sydney, Dec. 5-7, 2007

Posted on by Morgan Pitelka / 2 Comments

I’m headed on Sunday to Sydney to take part in an annual workshop on Japanese history. This is my first opportunity to travel to Australia and I’m excited to visit the largest Western nation that includes engagement with Asia as one of its major foreign policy platforms. I believe it is also the only English-speaking nation to have an Asian Studies major as a Prime Minister (elect); Wikipedia reports that Kevin Rudd of the Australian Labor Party “studied at the Australian National University in Canberra, residing at Burgmann College, and graduated with First Class Honours in Arts (Asian Studies). He majored in Chinese language and Chinese history, and is proficient in Mandarin.” Hao ji le.

The workshop includes a wonderful assortment of Japanese historians from across Australia, people whose work has had an influence on my own research but whom I’ve never had the chance to meet, like Tessa Morris-Suzuki and Elise Tipton. Also speaking are some newer people on the scene like the organizer, Matthew Stavros, and J. Charles Schencking, not to mention some Ph.D. candidates like Janet Borland and Rebecca Corbett. I’m one of three guests from abroad, along with David Howell from Princeton and Barbara Sato from Seikei University in Japan. A series of lectures and panels will be held at the University of Sydney over three days.

Sydney U, Courtesy of Matthew Stavros

I have to give my talk the morning after my arrival, which is a bit worrisome, but the topic is exciting for me because it comes out of my current research (I’m on sabbatical). Here’s the abstract:

Shogun, Deity, National Hero: Tokugawa Ieyasu and Japanese Material Culture.

Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616), founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate, has been glorified as a strict Confucianist and an astute military strategist in films, novels, and more recently, video games, lending him iconic status on a global scale. Remarkably little information is available in English, however, about his life away from the battlefield. My recent research explores Ieyasu’s cultural practices and social networks with the goal of narrating an alternative biography of the first Tokugawa Shogun. Like many samurai, it turns out that Ieyasu was a student of calligraphy and literature, an admirer of ceramics and painting, an ardent lover of hawks and horses, and an antiquarian who went to great ends to obtain beautiful things. His hobbies and acquisitions reveal much about the cultural proclivities of warlords and the almost sacred value their material legacies possessed postmortem.
My paper will propose that diachronic analysis of material culture associated with Ieyasu–namely the significant collection he amassed and divided up among his descendants before his death–allows us to frame him, his legacy, and the Tokugawa period itself in an entirely new way. I hope to use this project, as well as my previous research on Raku ceramics and tea culture, to develop a theoretical framework for studying the relationship between material culture and national identity in Japan.

I’ll write again after I return with a report on the workshop.

China/English/Hong Kong/Literature/Post-Mao

Jackie Chan and Louis Cha

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 4 Comments

Everybody knows about ping pong diplomacy, but we seem to have just completed a period of Canto-pop diplomacy, as Jackie Chan has recorded an “official” song for the Olympics. Canto-pop is of course the dreadful Cantonese pop music that infects every corner of the Chinese world. More generally I suppose it can be used to refer to the general pop culture of Hong Kong1 Just as Beijing used ping pong to try and create a connection with the U.S. so to the central government has embraced the commercial culture of Hong Kong as part of their attempt to create a Greater China. John Hamm discusses some of this in Paper Swordsmen which is partially about the rise of New School martial arts fiction but mainly about Jin Yong 金庸 and his work. Jin, a.k.a. Louis Cha, in addition to being the world’s best-selling author of martial arts novels is also the founder and long-time editor of Ming Pao once one of the more independent-minded papers in Hong Kong and now the center of a multi-national media empire. Zha was thus exactly the type of person Beijing would want to cultivate as they tried to re-unify the motherland. Zha was received by Deng Xiaoping at the Great Hall of the People in 1981, the first important figure from Hong Kong to be so honored. Zha would have been worth talking to just as a newspaper editor, but being an author of martial arts novelist made him even better. Although Beijing never accepted Tapei’s claims to be the “real” preservers of Chinese culture, after the Cultural Revolution a figure like Zha who had been critical of the CR and could make claims to be a preserver of Chinese culture was solid gold. As Beijing was trying to re-unify Hong Kong (and Taiwan) calling for a unified state was a non-starter, and so the ties of history and culture were needed. What is Chinese culture? Some bits of what might be called Chinese culture were not perhaps things Beijing wanted to play up, such as the Confucian concept of government by a class of incorruptible officials chosen for their skill rather than their connections. Everyone likes gong fu heroes, however, and given that so many of Cha/Jin Yong’s stories had strong anti-imperialist/ nationalist elements he was a perfect fit.

Jackie Chan is in some respects ever better for this than Louis Cha. He is, I think, about the last of the martial arts movie starts to have had real old-fashioned opera training. He is also a bit less prickly. Cha’s Ming Pao has been accused of cuddling up to Beijing a bit more than some would like, but he was also quite critical of Beijing, especially after 6/4. Chan is not critical of anything, as far as I can tell, and this sort of ties in the comic persona he takes on in most of his films.2 Bruce Lee does not work as well for Beijing’s purposes as a living symbol of Hong Kong culture. Besides being dead and thus unable to turn up for events far to many of his roles (and Jet Li’s) involved playing people who defied corrupt power-holders. The Jianghu (rivers and lakes) tradition that was at the center of martial arts fiction always had a problematic relationship with authority (That’s why so many of the stories have elements of Ming loyalism/ anti-Manchuism. That way one can defy cruel oppression and be loyal to the true rulers.) Jackie Chan has none of that (compare his Wong Feihong in Drunken Master with Jet Li’s in Once Upon a Time in China) If you want a nice, non-threatening haohan Jackie Chan is your man.

  1. At least I will use it that way in this post ↩

  2. I suspect that many of our readers know gong fu flicks better than I do ↩

China/English/Republican/Sino-Japanese Wars/visual culture

The crucibe of Revolution

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

One of the nice thing about studying modern Chinese history is that Chinese states have gone to gone to great lengths to collect oral histories and other accounts of events. The Communists were particularly good at this. The point of a lot of this is to make the revolutionary experience available to later generations. It was the events they witnessed and the suffering they felt that made people revolutionaries, and this radicalizing experience had to be packaged and distributed to new people. Thus the Communists were big on things like re-creating the Long March and re-creating the old battle against class enemies by flinging professors out windows (a topic my students always find interesting.) All of this began in the Republican period, of course. Here is a wartime cartoon by張乐平1

Continue reading →

  1. from 抗战漫画  ↩

Academia/Diaspora/English/Japan/US-Japan

Infrequency

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

I was looking over the new US Census name frequency lists [via] and noticed that there were no obviously Japanese names in the top 1000.1 In fact, the highest ranked one I could find was “Tanaka” (tied for #4160 with “Cornish”), followed closely by “Nakamura” (#4203), “Sato” at (#4276) and “Yamamoto” at #4289 (tied with “Schoonover”). That’s it for the top 5000. Looking at a list of most common Japanese names: “Suzuki” came in at #6045, “Watanabe” at #6295, “Takahashi” at #6378, “Ito” at #6998, “Saito” at #72492 , “Kobayashi” at #8097, and “Yamaguchi” (not on the top-ten list, but I seem to come across it a lot) at #10273.3

In other news, I just sent off my very minor corrections to the galley proofs of the Japanese-language translation of my Japanese Diasporas chapter. Kudos to the translator, who had to deal with sentences like “Should the quasi-legal warnings of the kokoroegaki or the official gravitas of Hara’s proclamation fail to impress, Yamaguchi emigrants were also required to sign contract-like pledges of good behavior.” and “Though there was some ebb and flow in the sugar plantation workload, it was not the cycle of temperate agriculture to which the Japanese were accustomed.” When I have to write in Japanese, I try very hard to think in Japanese, but when I’m writing in English, the last thing I’m thinking of is translatability. Anyway, it’s quite a thrill to see the work moving towards a new audience.

  1. I might have missed one, but I’ve looked twice. I didn’t count names which could be Japanese, phonetically, but which I’ve never heard used as Japanese names, at least not frequently.  ↩

  2. a three-way tie with “Danforth,” “Florio,” and “Krieg”  ↩

  3. “Dresner,” in case you’re wondering, is ranked #42912 (that’s not a typo: I’m in mid-five-digits), and my extended family accounts for almost two percent of the Dresners in the census.  ↩

Articles/China/Diplomacy

How many times can we lose China?

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

via James Fallows a link to James C. Thomson’s “How Could Vietnam Happen?” a 1968 piece that The Atlantic has lifted from their archive. Thomson was a China scholar, the son of China missionaries and that point newly resigned from the government over the direction of policy in Vietnam. One point Thomson made (really for the first time) was that Vietnam policy had a serious China hangover. The Kennedy administration had inherited, and largely accepted, old ideas from the 50’s, including both geopolitical ideas, such as that the Red Chinese were on the march and that American policy must contain this new peril, and more practical points, such as the cautionary example of what had happened to the careers of the China experts in the U.S. government who had made the crucial error of being right about the outcome of the Chinese civil war. Thomson laments the limited number of Asianists with real authority in government, but I was struck by how many there were and how much influence they had in comparison with present policy towards East Asia and above all towards Iraq. One of Thompson’s points is that many of the experts were hamstrung by their concern for their “effectiveness” i.e. as people of only limited power in the hierarchy they had to pick the points were they were willing to dissent. As points where knowledge and rationality could turn Vietnam policy in a good direction were pretty few, they ended up immobilized. Still, there were at least there to be immobilized and were writing pieces like this by 1968.

One of the things that struck me was how much less contact their is between the scholarly world and American foreign policy today. Assuming that you count the “loss” of China, there have been three disastrous failures in U.S. foreign policy since my dad was born, and they were all in Asia. The Thomson essay seems to be about an important turning point in American Asia policy, the point where things went from bad to worse. Within a year of its publication the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars was created1 and the divorce between state power and academia proceeded apace. While this was probably good for the academic world, I think it was pretty bad for America. Today I get the impression that a MESA member would be about likely to get a job making Iraq policy as a reporter from Al-Jazeera.2 The China hangover seems to be going on for a long time.

  1. I think Charles Hayford was one of the original members ↩

  2. Of course to some extent advice and knowledge are no good if powerholders don’t care. John Dower would no doubt have been quite happy to give President Bush a briefing on why the occupation of Iraq was not likely to be like that of Japan, but nobody wanted to listen. ↩

Books/China/English/Ming

Dragon mountain again

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

A few days ago Jonathan and I were discussing Steven Owen’s review of Jonathan Spence’s new book. Jonathan was not that impressed with the review, as it did not give a clear idea what the book was. We were not sure if we were unhappy with the review or the book. Having now read the book I can definitively say yes.
One purpose of the review is to encourage people to buy the book, which I suppose it does just by existing. On the other hand, as Jonathan pointed out, the review does not really tell you what the book is about. Owen gives the impression that the bulk of the book is about Zhang’s life as a dramatist. Actually most of the book is about the period is about life before 1644 and the bulk of it is not about Zhang himself but his descriptions of his family. They were a colorful group of minor officials, literati and eccentrics, some of them staggeringly corrupt, none more so than his uncle Sanshu who served as a bagman for Zhou Yanru, possibly the most corrupt official of the Ming dynasty. They are an interesting family, and for anyone who is interested in the local elite of the Late Imperial period (and who isn’t) there is a lot of interesting stuff in here. The problem with the book (at least for me) is that it is not a scholarly book, which is to say Spence does not engage with the scholarly literature or demonstrate how Zhang and his family fit in with what “we”1 know about the Ming elite. Sometimes this is just annoying, as when he calls the Hanlin Academy the Confucian Study Academy. Often it is more frustrating when I know full well that he could shed light on something but does not. His discussion of Zhang’s travel writing owes something to Strassberg’s Inscribed Landscapes, which Spence cites, but he does not explain how his or Zhang’s ideas about travel are different than those discussed by Strassberg. After the fall of the Ming Zhang becomes something of a wandering hermit, which may seem odd to people who don’t know much about Chinese history, but fits in well with the many traditions of dissent and the end of a dynasty that Spence, Zhang Dai and Alan Baumler know about. How is Zhang related to these traditions? I don’t doubt that Spence could discuss this at great length, but not in this book. A reader might pick this book up and come to the conclusion that Zhang Dai was a picaresque oriental other who might just as well have lived in the Song dynasty, Byzantium or 18th century Edo. It is not really an academic book, Spence seems to be fine with that, and so am I . It was a good read, I learned a lot from it, and so would pretty much anyone.. There is more in heaven and earth than is in academic monographs, and Spence apparently thinks so as well, as he includes this little story

…. at the heart of the scholarly life itself there often lurked a real element of futility. Strangely, Zhang Dai followed up this particular theme most carefully with the example of his own grandfather, whom at many levels he had clearly loved and respected, even revered. Yet, despite all his brilliance, grandfather—according to Zhang Dai—spent his last years of life in pursuit of a truly impossible vision, the compilation of an immense dictionary that would marshal all knowledge in composite categories based on a rhyme-scheme series of classifications. As Zhang Dai wrote in an essay aptly named “Rhyme Mountain,” right up to the end he rarely saw grandfather without a book in his hands, and piles of books lay in disorder all around his study, under layers of dust. When the sun was bright, grandfather took his books out of doors so he could read more easily. At dusk he lit candles and held his book right close to the flame, “leaning across the desk into the brightness.” Thus he would stay far into the night, showing no signs of tiredness. Claiming that all the previous dictionaries were inaccurate, grandfather determined to create his own, using the idea of mountains as his controlling metaphor of organization: key words were termed “high mountains,” catch phrases were “little mountains,” characters that had variant rhymes were termed “other mountains,” proverbs were classified as “worn-out mountains” and so on. In this “Rhyme Mountain,” wrote Zhang, grandfather’s columns of little characters followed in tight columns “like the pleats in a skirt, on sheets of paper yellowed from the beat of the lamp”; he had filled, in this way, over three hundred notebooks, “each thick as bricks.” Some rhyme schemes might fill ten books or more.

One sad day, an old friend brought grandfather a section of a huge manuscript encyclopedia from the palace library in Beijing, proving to him that all of this had been done before, better organized and on a far larger scale. Sighing, grandfather said: “The number of books is without end, and I have been like a bird seeking to fill the sea with pebbles. What can be the point of it?” So he pushed aside his thirty years of work and never returned to his “Rhyme Mountain.” And even had grandfather finished the project, Zhang Dai wrote, “Who on earth would have published it?” There was nothing left of all that work across thirty years but a pile of writing brushes with the whiskers worn down to the wood” and “piles of paper useful only for sealing storage pots.”

  1. people who have read too many books ↩

Academia/English/Historiography/Japan/Medieval/Popular Culture

A brief rant at an easy target

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 5 Comments

So I’m grading my latest World History quiz, and one of the terms is “samurai.” Being a two semester World History sequence, I didn’t spend a lot of time on the samurai — I had one day to cover pre-1500 Japan and Korea — so the answers were mostly based on the textbook (loosely) or people’s prior understandings of the term1 or on Wikipedia.2 At some point I got suspicious and looked up the glossary definitions at the back of the textbook.3 Most students don’t use it, but sometimes they think it’s a good short-cut for the short-answer identification quizzes I give. It’s a viable suspect.

Here’s what the book said:

Samurai (SAM-uhr-eye) A Japanese warrior who lived by the code of bushido (p. G-9)

Yeah, that’s it. No chronology, no economic or political context, and an undefined foreign term at the heart. A quick survey of the rest of the glossary reveals that most of the other definitions are: a) longer; and b) better. Not all, mind you.

Yeah, I had to check and see if they had, in fact, defined that foreign term.

Bushido (BOH-shee-DOH) The “way of the warrior,” the code of conduct of the Japanese samurai that was based on loyalty and honor. (p. G-2)

Aside from the proununciation error, it looks…. Oh, the Japanese samurai… as opposed to samurai elsewhere? “Honor” is a pretty vague term, too. Again, no chronology, no authorship, minimal context.

I know it’s a minor point, but this text is in its fourth edition and these textbooks go through what’s supposed to be exhaustive reviews by dozens of scholars. So why does the glossary read like a touched-up Western Civ text?

  1. ahem  ↩

  2. the Wikipedia article has a note at the top begging for expert assistance and citations. Any of our readers already wikipedians?  ↩

  3. Bentley and Ziegler and Streets, Traditions and Encounters: A Brief Global History  ↩

China/China-U.S./Current Events

Don't Toy With China

Posted on by C. W. Hayford / 3 Comments

I wrote an op-ed piece “Don’t Toy With China” for ASIA MEDIA, a web journal run by the UCLA ASIA INSTITUTE.  The piece looks at how the real issue of toy safety has been blown up by the recent uproar and outrage (or is it outroar and uprage?) fueled by hypocrisy and not a little whiff of racism.

I try to distinguish proportionate reactions to real problems from the flaps, scares, panics, smears, and political foolery which have marked the relations between the United States and China.

China/Economics/Qing

The emperor did care about the well-being of the peasants

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 3 Comments

From Oddnumbers1 a post on historical income inequality, which is based on this paper

One of the things that they conclude is that China in the 188o’s was the second most egalitarian society in their sample, coming out with a Gini coefficient that is just behind that of modern Denmark

gini

This is not actually all that surprising. As the authors point out hunter-gatherer societies are by their nature almost completely egalitarian. In the case of China the lack of a hereditary land-holding aristocracy would apparently make reduce the possibility of radical inequality like you find in Nueva Espana.2 The authors, however, are more interested in their new concept of inequality extraction ratio. Basically, they want to figure out what amount of the total surplus is in fact being extracted from those at the bottom. As societies get richer there is more surplus that could be extracted.  They hint that raw inequality is not as likely to create social unrest as a rising ratio, i.e. if the elite is taking a bigger cut of the possible pie. China seems to be very low on its possible ratio, and thus the elite was taking as small an amount of surplus as could be imagined.

Given that their only source on China is Chang Chung-li’s work from the early 60’s I suspect that they might get very different results with better data. Still, I find this interesting. They seem to assume that states are controlled by the elite and are machines for extracting wealth from the bottom classes. This seems to be at least some confirmation that Confucian rhetoric about caring about the well-being of the peasants had at least some effect on society.

  1. via Matthew Yglesias ↩

  2. I have problems with the ‘social tables’ they use for their pre-modern data, but I think I agree that differences between classes are more important than those within classes. The authors themselves point out that the data on China is taken from studies of the Chinese “gentry” a massive 2% of the population, unlike other places were work is done on real aristocrats. ↩

Art/Diaspora/Japan/Museums/US-Japan

Giant Robot Exhibition

Posted on by Morgan Pitelka / 1 Comment

The Japanese American National Museum once again displays its amazing ability to hone in on topics of widespread interest while still staying true to its mission in its new exhibition, “Giant Robot Biennnale”!

200711012202

From the website:

Developed in collaboration with Eric Nakamura of Giant Robot and the Japanese American National Museum

In celebration of its 50th issue and in collaboration with the Japanese American National Museum, the pop-culture magazine Giant Robot has assembled works by ten cutting-edge artists from around the country in Giant Robot Biennale: 50 Issues. APAK | Gary Baseman | David Choe | Seonna Hong | Sashie Masakatsu | Saelee Oh | Pryor Praczukowski | Souther Salazar | Eishi Takaoka | Adrian Tomine

200711012200

The curator of the exhibition and owner/co-editor of Giant Robot is Eric Nakamura, a fascinating character who has been pursuing his passions in the pages of this amazing magazine for the past 13 years. Part of what is exciting about his work in the magazine is that his and other authors’ articles perfectly measure the pulse of Asian and Asian American pop culture as a living, breathing entity rather than as a somewhat stale object of scholarly enquiry. Rather than linking interest in Japanese video games and J-pop stars with the now common stereotype of the urban otaku teenagers locked in their rooms, Giant Robot exposes the likes and dislikes, the artistic and musical travels, and the subtle but omni-present cultural politics of diverse individuals who identify with Japan while not being contained by it.

It’s also worth noting that as Giant Robot has increased its subscription base and attracted more attention and funding, Eric and his partner have become serious patrons of local and international artists, setting up galleries and improving their communities in various ways. I wish more academic institutions approached community relations the way these entrepreneurs do!

Academia/English/Historiography/Korea/Korea-Japan/US-Korea

Disparity Studies

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 4 Comments

In my discussion of the job market I said “I only saw two Korea positions, which seems about par for previous years: at some point, though, Korea positions should catch up with Japan ones.” Morgan Pitelka took exception, noting (correctly) that

Other than UCLA, which continues to have one of the most productive Korean studies programs outside of Korea, and perhaps Harvard and Columbia, how many grad schools are cranking out Korean studies PhDs? I also know of only a handful of liberal arts colleges with any substantial Korean studies, and rarely language. Very few regional/MA-granting universities have substantial Korean studies. Almost all have some Japanese studies. Also, as far as I know, few colleges or universities DON’T have access to study abroad in Japan. On the other hand, most colleges and universities don’t have study abroad options in Korea.

He’s absolutely right, of course: Korean studies doesn’t have the infrastructure Japanese studies does in the US1 and that means that — like the painfully slow growth of MidEast studies and Islamic history after 9/11 — it will take real time and effort to build. But that’s a symptom, I think, not the root of the issue. As I said, “Korean history is no less interesting than Japanese history, and the US is no less involved in Korean affairs than it is in Japanese affairs.”

Another commenter, “Overthinker” offered a cultural explanation:

There seem to be three fundamental reasons why Japanese Studies is “bigger” than Korean. One is that WW2 was more significant that the Korean War, and has given us longer-lasting imagery; household words like Pearl Harbour and Hiroshima that everyone knows about, whereas to most people the Korean War is basically Klinger in a dress. Second is the dominance of Japanese products in the marketplace: while LG and Samsung etc are strong players, they have not yet achieved the dominance of Toyota, Sony, and Nintendo. Third is the generally “cooler” images of Japan. Think of Korea, and most Americans would be hard-pressed to think beyond the aforementioned M*A*S*H and perhaps Kim Il Jung singing “I’m so ronery”. Mention Japan and people think of samurai and geisha and ninja, plus robots and giant rubber monsters stomping Tokyo on a regular basis. All these three factors would seem to indicate a greater interest in Japan at the BA level, which translates to bigger graduate programs, and more PhDs in the area. To become bigger, Korea needs to become more popular – more people at the undergrad level need to be curious about the place.

This is closer, I think: I definitely agree that Japan’s lead in economic and cultural production is a part of the puzzle. The relationship between pop culture images and student demand is not always straightforward, but it is true that there is more Japanalia in American culture than Koreania2 and more interest in the cultural roots of its economic success3 because that success was so striking in the 80s.

But, as I’ve said before, “there’s no question that a historian can’t complicate by talking about what led up to it” and I think the key to this puzzle is earlier. Much earlier: I think it starts in 1853.

Continue reading →

  1. or anywhere in the West, I think, but I’m just going to go with what I know  ↩

  2. No, I don’t know that “Koreania” is a word: would “Koreanalia” be closer?  ↩

  3. I just had a discussion with my World History students about Musashi’s Book of Five Rings….  ↩

Academia/Current/Recent Events/English/General/Japan/Korea-Japan

Disparity Studies

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 10 Comments

In my discussion of the job market I said “I only saw two Korea positions, which seems about par for previous years: at some point, though, Korea positions should catch up with Japan ones.” Morgan Pitelka took exception, noting (correctly) that

Other than UCLA, which continues to have one of the most productive Korean studies programs outside of Korea, and perhaps Harvard and Columbia, how many grad schools are cranking out Korean studies PhDs? I also know of only a handful of liberal arts colleges with any substantial Korean studies, and rarely language. Very few regional/MA-granting universities have substantial Korean studies. Almost all have some Japanese studies. Also, as far as I know, few colleges or universities DON’T have access to study abroad in Japan. On the other hand, most colleges and universities don’t have study abroad options in Korea.

He’s absolutely right, of course: Korean studies doesn’t have the infrastructure Japanese studies does in the US1 and that means that — like the painfully slow growth of MidEast studies and Islamic history after 9/11 — it will take real time and effort to build. But that’s a symptom, I think, not the root of the issue. As I said, “Korean history is no less interesting than Japanese history, and the US is no less involved in Korean affairs than it is in Japanese affairs.”

Another commenter, “Overthinker” offered a cultural explanation:

There seem to be three fundamental reasons why Japanese Studies is “bigger” than Korean. One is that WW2 was more significant that the Korean War, and has given us longer-lasting imagery; household words like Pearl Harbour and Hiroshima that everyone knows about, whereas to most people the Korean War is basically Klinger in a dress. Second is the dominance of Japanese products in the marketplace: while LG and Samsung etc are strong players, they have not yet achieved the dominance of Toyota, Sony, and Nintendo. Third is the generally “cooler” images of Japan. Think of Korea, and most Americans would be hard-pressed to think beyond the aforementioned M*A*S*H and perhaps Kim Il Jung singing “I’m so ronery”. Mention Japan and people think of samurai and geisha and ninja, plus robots and giant rubber monsters stomping Tokyo on a regular basis. All these three factors would seem to indicate a greater interest in Japan at the BA level, which translates to bigger graduate programs, and more PhDs in the area. To become bigger, Korea needs to become more popular – more people at the undergrad level need to be curious about the place.

This is closer, I think: I definitely agree that Japan’s lead in economic and cultural production is a part of the puzzle. The relationship between pop culture images and student demand is not always straightforward, but it is true that there is more Japanalia in American culture than Koreania2 and more interest in the cultural roots of its economic success3 because that success was so striking in the 80s.

But, as I’ve said before, “there’s no question that a historian can’t complicate by talking about what led up to it” and I think the key to this puzzle is earlier. Much earlier: I think it starts in 1853.

Continue reading →

  1. or anywhere in the West, I think, but I’m just going to go with what I know  ↩

  2. No, I don’t know that “Koreania” is a word: would “Koreanalia” be closer?  ↩

  3. I just had a discussion with my World History students about Musashi’s Book of Five Rings….  ↩

Academia/Current/Recent Events/English/General/Japan

The Job Market for Japanese Historians

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 11 Comments

This could be a very interesting year for the job market, not to mention for Asian history blogging. I know of three Asian history bloggers on the hunt for new jobs this year: none of them have started blogging about the experience, but I’d like to invite them — or any other blogger with an eye on the lists — to start, at least a little bit.1

It’s always been a bit of a curiousity to me that there isn’t more discussion on the blogs or listservs of the state of the market. Faculty with tenure don’t care, except perhaps about very particular opportunities. People already in tenure-track positions aren’t supposed to be watching the ads: makes the department nervous about their “committment.” People who are fresh on the market don’t want to … well, spook potential employers, mostly, though they might also be concerned about giving away too much about their own search decisions to competitors, as well. Me? Well, my blogging is already on my vita, so it’s not like I’m trying to hide it from potential employers.2 I’m a blogger: I talk about things that interest me.

Well, the majority of this year’s crop of jobs has been posted, and it’s time to take stock. I’ll start.

Continue reading →

  1. I’m not going to name the other ones here: it’s entirely up to them whether they want to take any aspect of this already grinding process public.  ↩

  2. Like I could, at this point! Not.  ↩

Japan/Web Sites

Calendar converter

Posted on by Morgan Pitelka / 0 Comment

Some of you may know about this tool already, but I just discovered Matthias Schemm’s wonderful NengoCalc, an online or offline converter of Japanese and Western dates.

Converting premodern Japanese dates to the Western calendar is extremely tricky because the years were not coterminus until Japan’s adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1873. So, to cite a well known example, Tokugawa Ieyasu was born on the 26th day of the 12th month of the 11th year of the reign period Tembun. Most of Tembun 11 corresponds to 1542, but not all of it. As NengoCalc nicely informs us, Ieyasu was born on January 31, 1543, which happened to be a Wednesday.

Thanks Matthias!

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