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!

Books/China/Ming

Return to Dragon Mountain

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 6 Comments

There is a long review of Jonathan Spence’s new book Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man in TNR. Just the fact that there is a long review of a book on Chinese history in something like TNR is worthy of note. The review is by Steven Owen, who is a noted scholar of Chinese poetry, and perhaps not the ideal person to review a book on history. On the other hand he may be the ideal person to review a book by Spence, “whose own career as a historian has ventured along the contested frontier between history and literature.” Having not yet read the book I can’t offer definitive comments on either it or the review, but it may be that either Spence or Owen is getting something wrong about Ming history-writing. The book centers on Zhang Dai a well-known literatus/historian of the Late Ming and early Qinq. Owen describes Zhang’s problems in the writing of history.

Zhang Dai was far from the only person of his day who wanted to write the history of the Ming. Among gentlemen of learning it was a common ambition, with a cachet of dignified purpose that gave meaning to idleness. The problem was that none of these aspiring historians had the sources to go beyond known facts, common opinion, and judgments that were, by and large, conventional. The age of the private historian of a dynasty was long past. The resources to write such a history were primarily in archives in the capital, under the watchful eye of a government with its own vested interest in historical accounts. China was too big. The private historian was often successful in direct proportion to the limitation of his scope to the world that he knew best.

I think this is getting something wrong, in that he seems to be presenting Zhang as a frustrated Rankean who was unable to write “real” history. Zhang certainly would have refused to have worked on the Qing’s official Ming History project, but I suspect he would have been just as unhappy with a project presided over by the Ming court (and, like any member of literati class he would have been quite aware of ways of getting around court dictates while working on a court-sponsored project.) I am not sure Zhang Dai wrote the type of stuff he did entirely because he had been locked out of power, but rather that he was not happy with the centralized narrative the state historiography produced regardless of who the patron was.

Or maybe I’m wrong. I guess I will have to read the book.

Books and Articles/Colonial/Korea/Korea-Japan

Thought Crime Arrests 1928-1944

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 4 Comments

I spent a beautiful Saturday hanging with the old folks in 효창공원 near my place. This small park is full of interesting things including an anti-Communist memorial, the graves of various nationalist heroes, and includes the grave, museum and library for the man himself, Kim Koo (백범기념관). I spent my time in the park reading the first volume of 『해방 전후사 사료 연구』and thought I would share a chart from a chapter on late colonial historical materials by 이완범.

After listing some of the available materials and lamenting the general lack of good historical sources for the late colonial period (1937-1945), most of the chapter is dedicated to using statistics to look at the period, or more specifically, independence movements during the period.1

I’m sharing two of his tables, merged together below2 which contain statistics on arrests for thought crimes in colonial Korea from 1928-1944.

Thought Crime Arrests 1928-1944
Year
Cases
Persons
Ave. Persons Per Case
1928 227 1592 7.0
1929 253 1743 6.9
1930 397 4025 10.1
1931 436 3659 8.4
1932 345 4989 14.4
1933 213 2641 12.4
1934 183 2389 13.1
1935 172 1740 10.1
1936 167 2762 16.5
1937 134 1637 12.2
1938 145 1344 7 (9.3)
1939 95 1042 6.9 (11)
1940 103 1193 10.1 (11.6)
1941 232 861 8.4 (3.7)
1942 183 1142 14.4 (6.2)
1943 322 1002 12.4 (3.1)
First half 1944 132 337 13.1 (2.6)
Total 3,739 34,098  
Average 225.43 2,110.06 12.2 (9.4)

Note: The averages in 이완범’s chart for people per case seemed off from 1938-1944 and I can’t find any note of a change in his method of calculation or source for his numbers (anyone have a guess for where he is getting the numbers from?). Thus I have put my own quick calculation in parentheses for these years.

Cases Per Year Peopleperyear-1

Note: Though I’m sure there is a better way, in these charts I have simply doubled numbers from first half of 1944 for the 1944 entries.

Numbers can be so much fun and feel so meaty (especially when accompanied by colorful charts), but what can these numbers tell us by themselves?
Continue reading →

  1. It is unfortunate that, with the exception of the first chapter on materials related to wartime mobilization, everything in the first volume of such a general title focuses on independence movements. Volume two discusses mostly the postwar period, with materials related to education, political history, North Korean publications and US archival materials on the North Korean economic policies.  ↩

  2. 『해방 전후사 사료 연구』p88 and p91. 이완범 takes the material from 朝鮮総督府警務局（編）『最近に於ける朝鮮治安状況』for materials up to 1939 and 近藤釖一（編）『太平洋戦争下終末期朝鮮の治政』 for the years therafter. The footnotes for the chart notes some discrepancies for the 1934 and 1945 numbers between the 1936 edition and his 1938 edition and an alternative lower case number of 74 for 1939 in a different source published in 1940, but it may not have been stats for the full year.  ↩

Blogs and Carnivals/China/English/Teaching

Some stuff

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

Just some random stuff that caught my eye.

Have any of our readers spent time teaching English in Asia? You blew it. You thought you were doing well just by making good money by not working, but actually you could have become a cult leader like Li Yang.

Li Yang

Also, something nice on teaching American history to Turks, which of course led me to think about teaching American History to Chinese. Black Sheep has links to some cool stuff on Chinese Astronomy Also a nice bit from Michael Turton about Chinese growth and the East Asian model. Granite Studio has a good post up on Chinese historical zombies

China/Current Events/English/Post-Mao

China on display

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Playfair

Historians have been very interested in World’s Fairs, international exhibitions and such for a while now. This is in part because of Gellner and Anderson’s ideas about nationalism, and above all the idea of a nation as an imagined community. Looking at a country’s exhibit at some sort of international do is a quick and easy way to figure out what their imagined community is, or at least what the people responsible would like to claim that it is to an audience of foreigners.
We are in the run-up to one of these events now, the Beijing Olympics. Lots of people (including lots of people in the Chinese government) are aware that this will be China’s big moment of exposure, and they are trying to spin how China will be seen long before the first shot is put. China Rights Forum has a whole issue out on it on this which can be found on-line here I liked Chen Kuide’s essay where he hopes that the Beijing Olympics will end up like the Seoul Olympics, where international attention may have helped the democracy movement, rather than like the Hitler Olympics where the Olympic movement served to validate the power of one of history’s greatest monsters. Even more interesting was Xu Jilin’s essay The Making of a True Athletic Superpower Xu contrasts the current Olympics with what he saw in Vancouver in 2004.

Continue reading →

China/Maoist era (1949-1976)/visual culture

Non-commercial emotion

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 2 Comments

James Fallows recommends the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Center. At least as a web museum it is not as good as Stefan Landsberger’s I did find the introduction (English only, apparently) interesting

Each poster exhibited here is a piece of art with history when all the people in China sacrificed for the greatness of one person. Mao Zedong ruled over China from 1949 to 1976. He turned around a quarter of the globe population in continuous political movements, especially in Culture Revolution, to fight with each other physically or mentally. The traditional Chinese philosophy and morality was abused. The sky and earth turned upside down. Nightmare came to its end at last as Mao died in 1976 and the civilization of China survived. The propaganda posters presented here tell you all these stories.

Today China is on the right track for prosperity again. Shame will it be to forget the recent past. Our purpose and responsibility is to help people understand the process of the rebirth. Long live the great Chinese people and its civilization. From art viewpoint, many of these pieces are great art works created by none commercial emotion. Time is changed and such kind of art could not be repeated. They are so limited and very hard to be found now. The value will be tremendous in the future.

We are very proud to have the best collection of this kind in the world and we are serious to prepare for a special museum in Shanghai for the education of the younger generation as well as being the destination of the foreign visitors.

The one thing that jumped out at me was the point that these were “created by none commercial emotion” but their “value will be tremendous in the future” In China as it lots of other places the relation between Art and Money has long been a complex topic. If for some reason you wanted to say something nice about the Mao period you could point out, as here, that it was less commercialized and money-grubbing than, say, the China of today.

Mastodon