1945-1950/Historiography/Korea/Seoul

The 30-second tour of historical Pukchon

Posted on by Owen / 1 Comment

When I was in Korea last month I stayed at a lovely place in the area of Seoul known as Pukchon or ‘North Village’ that lies between the two big palaces. It’s actually an area made up of many small neighbourhoods (tongs) that was once favoured by yangban aristocrats and now by the the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. It’s been discovered as a tourist area and parts of it have been ‘conserved’ while others have come to have a distinctly up-market feel with trendy cafes and so on. Having said that, not everyone there is convinced that what is being done to conserve and promote the area is actually in its best interests, as this site run by a British expat recounts.

While staying there I happened to notice a few sites of historical importance that might be overlooked on your average tour, and they are all conveniently within a few metres of one another and a stone’s throw away from the walls of Ch’angdokkung Palace in Kye-dong. None of these sites are anything to look at, as you will see from my pictures, but they should have some significance to anyone interested in the history of Korea with about half a minute to spare. So, I proudly present my 30-second tour of historical Pukchon:

Starting out from the front gate of Ch’angdokkung, take the small road up the left-hand side of the palace wall, passing the big Hyundai buildings on your left. When you come to the first left turning take this, going up a short hill. Just over the top of this on the right-hand side of the road is my first site: an engraved stone marking the site of Yŏ Un-hyŏng’s house:

Site of Yo Un-hyong's house
I’ve written something on my own site before about Yŏ Un-hyŏng, a moderate leftist nationalist who found himself in the way of Kim Ku in the late 1940s and was assassinated not that far away from Pukchon, on the other side of Ch’angdokkung, in Hyehwa-dong. Yo was one of those important historical figures who has been somewhat swept aside by history – he had apparently met Lenin when he visited Moscow in 1922, had worked for Chiang Kai-shek and was one of the founders of the short-lived Korean People’s Republic in 1945.

Moving a little further down the street and a building that might be mistaken for a large house turns out to be the offices of the Yŏksa Munje Yŏn’guso (Institute for Korean Historical Studies):

Yoksa munje yon'guso
In some ways this is an organisation that has historical importance in its own right as the main left nationalist history association to emerge from the political turmoil and radicalisation of the 1980s in South Korea. This is the organisation that founded the Yoksa Pip’yŏngsa (Historical Criticism) publishing company whose books will be found on the shelves of any historian of Korea and which publishes the important historical journal Yŏksa Pip’yŏng. The views associated with this organisation and its members are generally regarded as having achieved the status of historical orthodoxy in the Korean academy, although these days they are being challenged by new trends such as ‘postnationalism‘ and quantitative history.

Finally, if you retrace your steps a little and take the first turning on the left up a narrow street, a signboard on a building on the left side of the street should catch your attention. It’s the headquarters of the Min clan:

Min-ssi HQ
It would be impossible to overstate the importance of this one family in the history of late nineteenth century Korea. Somehow though, its current manifestation seems inappropriately prosaic, especially with the little scooter parked outside.

Books/China/Economics/English/Qing/Republican

Salt

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 4 Comments

One of the many, many cool things about Madeleine Zelin’s new book The Merchants of Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China is its discussion of guanyun, or official shipping. The book as a whole is about the evolution of the salt trade in Zigong, Sichuan in the Late Qing and Republic. Salt was of course a major industry in Qing China, and as in many other places in the world of great interest to the state, as it was easily taxed. Therefore sources are abundant, and Zelin has written one of the best recent books on Chinese business history. Nobody working on the Chinese economy today still accepts the old position that the Chinese economy was run by glorified peddlers who lived in terror of offending the dreaded Mandarins, but at the same time there have been very few detailed studies of the development of Chinese economic organizations and businesses.

Of the many things that I like about this book the treatment of Ding Baozhen’s 1877 proposal for a system of state-run wholesale shipping of salt. Salt smuggling was an endemic problem for Chinese states, and of course those best placed to smuggle salt were the official salt merchants, who had the capital, transport, and knowledge of the market to be really effective at large-scale smuggling. The official transport system aimed at curbing smuggling by having wholesale salt shipments be made by the state, rather than licensing merchants to buy salt from the yards then trusting them to ship and sell it appropriately. This was a system with many annoying features for salt producers and merchants. The state preferred to deal with the larger producers and to buy salt evaporated with natural gas rather than coal, which tended to drive out small producers. Producers could no longer wrap and brand their own salt, and the state set prices. Vertically integrated salt firms became almost impossible to maintain.

The reason I find all this interesting, is that the Qing and Republican states followed almost the same pattern, for pretty much the same reasons, with the opium trade.  Of course there the fact that state policy was retarding the growth of business would have been regarded as a plus. Still, it is interesting to see that the state was developing a set of policies that it applied to a multiple trades.

China/Diplomacy/Historiography/Imperialism/Qing

We have never valued ingenious articles

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 6 Comments

The generally excellent blog Jottings from the Granite Studio has an interesting post up on practical learning. The post is about the tendency of American universities to be too specialized, which I more or less agree with, but he uses a historical comparison I don’t much care for. Yes, it’s the Qianlong emperor’s reply to Lord Macartney, the most widely used quote from a pre-modern Chinese in Western writings on China, and perhaps the most often misused. Lord Macartney was sent to China in 1793 to negotiate the opening of more ports to British trade. The mission failed for any number of reasons, but it is constantly brought up as an example of the failure of the Chinese to comprehend the modern world. In particular Qianlong’s lack of interest in the clocks and mechanical devices the British presented them with is always presented as a repudiation of Science and Rationality in favor of Stasis and Tradition. Granite Studio

The Qianlong Emperor and his officials smirked at the pretty clocks the British kept presenting as gifts to the throne, dismissing them as mere toys, not realizing that the same precision instruments needed to make intricate clockworks are equally useful for making advanced artillery, rifles, and the instruments of war.

This is based on a couple of lines in the Qianlong emperor’s letter to George III, where he said.

The Celestial Empire, ruling all within the four seas, simply concentrates on carrying out the affairs of government properly, and does not value rare and precious things…[W]e have never valued ingenious articles, nor do we have the slightest need of your Country’s manufactures

I have a number of problems with this. I am not particularly interested in defending the honor of the Qianlong emperor, but the way this event is used, (and it is used a lot) is not very good history. For one thing, to expect anyone in 1793 to look at a mechanical clock and see the industrial revolution is wildly anachronistic. Clocks and clockwork go way back and nobody at the time even knew the industrial revolution was happening. Qianlong was in fact correct, there were few things that the British could sell in China at a profit (hence the opium trade.) Although Lord Macartney was proud of his nation’s manufactures and was in favor of an increase in Trade had you suggested to him that he represented the King of a nation of shopkeepers he probably would have had his servants give you a good thrashing. He was apparently much impressed with his hosts at the Qing court, and the whole mission is hard to fit into the modern stories we like to tell about the backward Chinese.

More importantly although the failure of the mission was later fit into narratives of Chinese backwardness and irrationality, that is not how the it was seen at the time. As Hevia p. 238 points out, this document was not even translated into English until 1896 and nobody at the time saw it as being of any importance. Quite a lot of interesting work has been done, by Hevia and others, on what the mission can tell us about the Qing, Empire, and such, but the old narrative still seems quite popular.

English/Film/Historiography/Japan/Okinawa/War/昭和

Worth Noting

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

John Dower kicks off the American Historical Association’s Perspectives newsletter’s new “Masters at the Movies” series with a review and commentary of the two Eastwood Iwo Jima movies. It is, as you’d expect from John Dower, well sourced, psychologically sensitive, clear-headed and even-handed. Nothing very new there, but a good survey of the end-of-war issues and narratives. End-of-war issues remain sensitive in Japan1. For a completely different perspective, Richard Frank’s review of Maddox’s Hiroshima book claims, as so many conservative commentators have before, that it settles the “revisionism” questions once and for all. We’ll see.

Non Sequitur: In other news, this week’s Japan Focus is all about current immigration issues in Japan, so I’ll have to read it and see if anyone’s got an historical perspective worth noting.

  1. then there’s the cabinet minister resignation, etc.  ↩

Diaspora/English/General/Intellectual/Japan/Korea-Japan/Law/Literature/昭和

Diasporic Remnants

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 1 Comment

I’m always interested in interesting tales and connections regarding the Japanese diaspora. Here’s a couple that I’ve run across: New research on Japanese settlers in Korea; Jorge Luis Borges, the great surrealist, married a Nikkei Argentinian woman late in life; Japanese post-WWII settlers in the Dominican Republic abandoned by both governments. I love being part — a small part, but nonetheless — of the diaspora studies movement. We’re complicating the history of the world, chronicling the wonderful diversity of seemingly simple things. [continued…]

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Books/China/Class/Literature/Translation

Exporting Maoism

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 3 Comments

In my Intro to Asian Studies class this semester I am teaching Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s The Girl From the Coast The story is a fictionalized account of his Grandmother’s life and thus is set in Java around 1900 or so. One of the things I am finding interesting about it is that the book seems to me to have been heavily influenced by his time in China . Pramoedya was heavily influenced by the time he spent in China in the 50’s and he saw the Maoist model as a way of re-invigorating the Indonesian revolution. While in China he actually helped make “steel” in backyard furnaces, and when he returned to Indonesia he wanted to purge the literary world of those works and authors that did not advance the cause of revolution.

The Girl From the Coast has pretty clearly been influenced by Mao’s Yenan Talks. The protagonist , the nameless Girl from the Coast is so obviously representing the oppressed masses that in a movie version she would have to be played by Gong Li  We get a few lengthy speeches about the class situation the characters find themselves in. The story is about the Girl’s life after she is trapped in an arranged marriage, but as Pramoedya had already rejected what he called Universal Humanism the solution is not Love, a concept that does not turn up much in this book.

On the other hand the solution is not Revolution either, which makes the book a more interesting than a lot of the Maoist stuff. Instead Pramoedya valorizes the life of the fishing village she came from. The village is -not- oppressed like the urban people are. They are too remote and poor for that. When they fake a pirate attack to cover up their killing of an aristocrat one of the villagers wonders who will believe that pirates would attack a village so poor that “even the jellyfish stay away.” They pay no taxes and the only oppression they get comes from the Sea, and the ultimate solution to problems seems to be a return to village life.  It sound more like Shen Congwen than Mao Dun. The book is more similar to contemporary Chinese writing, which may criticize the feudal past but does not find the solution in the Red Sun of Chairman Mao. On the other hand is does seem to have a serious Maoist hangover, in that it is the story of the Girl’s growing class consciousness, and perhaps it is intended to encourage class consciousness in the reader. Or maybe I just see China everywhere.

China-Japan/Cultural/Diaspora/Historiography/Japan/Memory/War

Reminder to self: Complicating History

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 2 Comments

This is an old-fashioned web-log post: links that I don’t want to lose in the ether or the depths of my Eudora folders. Both are from Japan Focus, and both have to do with complicating our view of Japanese history.

The first is a conceptual and migratory complication, which I’m always in favor of, by Chris Burgess: “Multicultural Japan? Discourse and the ‘Myth’ of Homogeneity”. Burgess does a bit of deconstruction on both Nihonjinron and its attackers, problematizing both homogeneity and diversity. Then he talks about migration, but goes beyond the usual platitudes by addressing actual numbers and even coherent international comparisons! I’m not entirely convinced — limiting the migration discussion to in-migration always makes me a little wary — but that’s why I want to go back and read it again another time.

The second is Aaron William Moore’s “Essential Ingredients of Truth: Soldiers’ Diaries in the Asia Pacific War”, which includes not only a substantial discussion of WWII diaries, but also a contextual discussion of the tradition of diary-keeping in modern Japan, especially the military, a discussion of the publication of military diaries in Japan, and then concludes with a discussion of wartime military diaries from other countries, so as to put the Japanese diaries in the fullest possible context.

Go, read, and come back and discuss, perhaps? Perhaps not.

Update: Nobuko Adachi — editor of the recently reviewed collection of Diaspora studies in which I had a chapter1 — graces this week’s Japan Focus with “Racial Journeys: Justice and Japanese-Peruvians in Peru, the United States, and Japan”, which tells the story of the WWII era deportation to the US and interment of Japanese-Peruvians, and the slow realization by the governments involved that a grave injustice was done. She then goes on to discuss the dekasegi and other return migration (including that most famous Japanese-Peruvian, Alberto Fujimori) and the crisis created by Japan’s economic slowdown. Interesting stuff.

  1. In spite of the very positive review, the book’s rank at Amazon is just on the cusp of the top million…. ↩

China/Classics/Current Events/English/Post-Mao

National sudies fever

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 4 Comments

China’s intellectual world needs to bundle up better, and wear its galoshes, since it tends to catch a lot of “fevers.” The current one is for Guoxue, usually translated as “national studies” and probably best thought of as parallel to the Western discipline of Classics. Guoxue, the study of early Chinese history, philosophy and culture all mixed together has a long history although it has not been a terribly lively field. I always remember the Guoxue sections in bookstores as being full of very detailed stuff on philology and whatever written by people whose interest in China petered out around 1368, if not long before. The May Fourth Movement was strongly anti-national studies and above all anti-Confucius, a position shared by Mao. This has started to change in the last few years and the biggest figure is Yu Dan professor of media studies, TV personality and, author of the best-selling 于丹论语心得, her rather idiosyncratic take on the Analects.1 The book promises to use the wisdom of Confucius to help you live in the modern world.

Needless to say as the author of a best-seller and a TV personality and a woman professor (of media studies!) she has come under some criticism by “real” scholars. Some of this seems spot on. She apparently thinks that that term 小人 means “child” which is just utterly wrong, as it means “small man” the opposite of “gentleman” 君子， one of the key concepts in the Analects. On the other hand it is hard not to think that some of the criticism is coming because her books are selling better than other people’s.

I find her popularity sort of interesting in lots of ways, but one of the most significant is her approach to the Classics. While she may not know much about Confucius or classical China, and the jibe that her book is “Chicken Soup for the Chinese Soul” is so sharp because it seems to be true, she does seem to have at least one thing right, in that she sees Analects as wisdom literature that is supposed to change your behavior rather than something for purely academic study, a point lots of classical Confucians would have agreed with.

In an interview on Sina.com she was asked about her book’s “respectful yet not awed” attitude towards the Analects. She replied that it was this just the point, people come to these stories with different experiences and get different things out of them for that reason. This is pretty close to Oprah territory, where all of human experience is grist for the mill of self-improvement and self-satisfaction. Of course this is why she sells, but suspect that Confucius might have agreed that the point is self-improvement, although he certainly would not have agreed that past models can be used in any way we want.

Her specific example here is also interesting. She mentions the story of Jing Ke as one that people have read many meanings into. One of the criticisms of her is that her paeans to “harmony” as the key thing modern societies can learn from Confucius are why she is so acceptable to Beijing. She is no Fang Xiaoru to be sure, but I found it significant that she picked the example of the righteous assassin as her example.  

  1. Which I have not yet read ↩

Blogs and Carnivals/China/Current Events/Economics/English/Taiwan

Take grain as the key link

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 2 Comments

Securing grain supplies and providing food security for the peasants was always one of the main duties of the Chinese state, partly because of their deep concern for the well-being of the peasants and partly because they wanted to prevent rebellions. I always teach my students that in a modern market economy secure supplies of staples like grain are less of a concern for the state, and in any case the prices of these things are low enough that most consumers pay little attention.

In China the old level of concern with basic commodity prices stuck around a lot longer. One of my friends spent a winter at a Beijing university in the 80’s, and when she arrived the director of the program assembled the incoming foreign students and said that they had no doubt heard about the poor harvests in the area and were worried about the food supply. She of course had not heard about the poor harvests, and as an American would not have cared, since she was not used to living in a society where her personal food supply was connected to local harvests. The director assured them that things would be fine, because while harvests of almost everything else had been awful, the cabbage harvest had been excellent, and they could be assured of a plentiful supply of cabbage all winter long.

Apparently something similar is happening in Taiwan. Michael Turton reports that wheat prices are going up across Asia, and that Taiwan in particular is feeling the crunch. His sources blame bad harvests, but I suspect that at least part of the problem is that American demand for ethanol is pushing American farmers away from wheat and into corn. I already knew that American SUV’s were destroying the rainforest, but I did not know that they were also depleting the world supply of baozi.

Diaspora/Education/General/International Affairs/Japan/US-Japan/明治

Hawaiian Kanji

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 3 Comments

No, I’m not going to show you some cartoon of a spam musubi or a “remove your shoes” sign. This is, apparently, serious stuff: Educators working with the Hawaiian language revitalization and immersion movements have begun to use Kanji — and Japanese language generally — as a teaching tool for the Hawaiian language.

In spite of the fact that this press release came from my own institution, I actually know nothing about this. It’s wild stuff, but it has some very interesting pedagogical and cultural and linguistic foundations. There is a PDF from ‘Aha Pūnana Leo (‘APL) which has a great deal of detail and examples, including the one mentioned in the press release.

The core of the program is that both Hawaiian and Japanese are, phonetically speaking, syllabic languages, and that there are a lot of Japanese in Hawai’i, including relatives and ancestors of students in the Hawaiian program. The teachers who designed the program, aside from instilling respect, understanding and aloha in their students, wanted to use the ideographic characters to emphasize the syllabic nature of Hawaiian, as opposed to the alphabetic system of Roman letters. After assigning basic characters to each of the forty-five syllables of the Hawaiian language, they went on to teach the students more kanji by meaning, as well as conventional Japanese language instruction.1

I have to admit, it seems like a terribly roundabout way of handling the languages.

There’s an interesting historical side note to this, though. As I wrote in my dissertation2:

Hawaiian King Kalakaua visited Japan in 1881 and made three proposals which, although they were rejected, endeared the Hawaiian monarch to the Japanese authorities. The offer to revise their treaty to eliminate extra-territoriality was rejected so as not to interfere with similar negotiations with the Great Powers. An impulsive offer by King Kalakaua for a marriage alliance between his niece and an Imperial Prince (ages six and fifteen years, respectively) was turned down after a show of due consideration. Finally, a “Union and Federation of Asian Nations and Sovereigns” which would have given Japan a platform to demonstrate leadership and build prestige in the Pacific was rejected as endangering the generally good relationship between Japan and the United States, which had particularly strong interests in Hawai’i.

Hawai’i and Japan might have had a much closer relationship, and there might have been even more Japanese influence on the islands than there already is. There is also considerably more influence the other way than most people realize. There is an extensive Hula halau (school/team) network in Japan, whose members regularly visit Hawai’i to study with local teachers and immerse themselves in the culture.3 The Japanese government has even promoted the Hawaiian shirt (in its Okinawan form, officially) as a cool answer to the problem of work attire, and there are still lots and lots of Japanese who come to Hawai’i for honeymoons and vacations who could do some good for the economy and ecology of both countries by stocking up.

Sheer geography and the history of Japanese migration to Hawai’i has created an interesting — and definitely under-studied — relationship. One that could be shaped anew by a really creative reimagining of language pedagogy. Or it could be a complete dead end.

  1. as the press release points out, one of the criticisms of the Hawaiian immersion program is that it seems somewhat limited, in terms of economic potential after graduation. Japanese, of course, is the road to riches. At least that’s what it says in the big print.  ↩

  2. p. 20. The citation is to Hilary Conroy’s The Japanese Frontier in Hawai’i, pp. 50-52  ↩

  3. one of the best Hula dancers and Hawaiian singers I’ve seen recently was a Japanese woman who teaches Hula in Japan  ↩

Academia/English/General/Japan/Literature/Translation/US-Japan

Seidensticker’s Passing

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 1 Comment

I’m not one of those Japan scholars who came to the field as a Japanophile1 , and my preferred literary reading tends to speculative fiction, humorous verse and historical adventures. I’m almost certainly the wrong person to comment on Edward Seidensticker’s passing, but I’ll do until someone better comes along.

If you’ve studied Japanese history, literature, culture or society, the odds are extremely good that you’ve read something translated by Seidensticker. I’ve assigned his works before, particularly Kawabata’s Sound of the Mountain and the abridged Tale of Genji. I’ve read a lot of the other Kawabata and Tanizaki he translated, and it always seemed to me that he was a sympathetic and faithful translator, but a final judgement would have to come from people who know the original works and the process of literary translation more intimately than myself.

I have to admit that I’ve never read Seidensticker’s memoir, so I can’t tell you much more about his life, etc. I can say, though, that his work is one of the great foundation stones of my own career. Not that I drew on his scholarship or ever met the man, but his accessible translations were fodder for hundreds of thousands of students, and the interest they raised sustained the growth of Japanese Studies.2

  1. nor as a Japanophobe. Just curious, really.  ↩

  2. There’s an interesting argument to be had, perhaps, over whether cultural or economic factors are more important in area studies. I don’t have a strong feeling one way or the other except to note that they promote very different kinds of scholarship and that we have usually had in Japanese studies a reasonably good balance.  ↩

Academia/China-Japan/English/General/Japan/Memory/Occupation/Politics/US-Japan/War/昭和

Useful, Inconvenient History

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

President Bush cited John Dower regarding the potential for post-war democratization. Bush was using Dower’s Embracing Defeat to ridicule those who believe the occupation of Iraq is failing to achieve a stable or democratic result by citing those who incorrectly believed that creating a liberal democratic state in Japan after WWII was impossible. This is a fairly transparent invocation of the “Galileo Gambit,” pointing out that people have, unsurprisingly, sometimes been wrong about things they felt strongly about and that the people who were right have sometimes been in the minority.

It’s interesting to see the example of Japan coming up again, as it was very commonly cited in the run-up to the Iraq war. John Dower himself, as the article points out, wrote several articles demolishing the idea that Japan was a good analogy to Iraq in this regard.1 Dower has also argued that Iraq is like Manchuria (with the US in the role of Japan) and more likely to be a quagmire than a shining example of modernity.2 The Bush Administration immediately disavowed any endorsement of Dower’s views outside of the citation made by the President, and this kind of historical cherry picking and selective ignorance is all too typical of politicians in general.

It bolsters my complaint from yesterday, though: a better understanding of Asian history generally, and of US involvement in it, would be all to the good, but so often Asia is just a foil, out of context and interesting only insofar as it affects us.

  1. November 2002 and March 2003  ↩

  2. I’ve also made the Manchuria analogy, and it still stands up pretty well, I’m afraid.  ↩

Academia/English/General/Historiography/Japan

Asia as a Marginal Category

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

Here we go again.

The American Historical Association has proposed new rules for adding and eliminating membership categories, those “areas of scholarly interest” which allow university presses and conference panel organizers to find us when they need us. The last time they tried to eliminate “psychohistory” they got slammed, and these procedures are a response to that, an attempt to assuage feelings of persecution by creating a “fair procedure.” The process for adding a category is only slightly absurd: ten members in good standing have to sign a petition and, after verifying the good standing of the signatories, the association “staff” will make a recommendation to the Council (our highest muckety-mucks, the ones we vote for) regarding the inclusion of the category in the taxonomy of professional historians.1 The procedure for eliminating a category is a very impersonal one, by contrast: when the number of members picking a category drops below five for several years in a row, and warning people in Perspectives doesn’t change that, then “subject to Council’s final approval, that category will be deleted or consolidated.”

The categories are already a bit odd, frankly: revision wouldn’t be a bad idea. Take my own taxonomic position:

First area of scholarly interest: 258 Meiji Restoration, 1868-1912 (Japan)
Second area of scholarly interest: 710 Demography, Population, and Social Life
Third area of scholarly interest: 250 Japan

The first thing, of course, is that 1868-1912 isn’t the Meiji Restoration, but the Meiji era, and there isn’t a “19c” category to cover the growing scholarship on the transition. Second is that “Demography” is one of many choices I could have made to cover my study of Japanese labor migration to Hawai’i, including

705 – Asian American
726 – Labor
759 – Diaspora Studies
760 – Immigration
711 – Diplomatic/International

I actually was expecting to find a “transnational” category: “708 – Comparative” doesn’t quite cover it, and very little of what I do qualifes as “diplomatic history.” Third, of course, is that you’re only allowed to pick three categories, so my interest in Japanese colonial migration would have to be expressed in one of the following:

259 – Taisho and Early Showa Japan, 1912-1941
260 – Rise of Militarism and World War II (Japan)
275 – Colonial Korea, 1910-1945

There’s no category for “imperialism” or “colonialism” generally.2 Moreover, picking one of those would mean that I’d have no way to indicate “Japan” generally as something I’m interested in: clearly some form of nesting tree structure would make more sense than completely discreet categories.

Taxonomy Categories Vulnerable to Consolidation or Elimination, 2007OK, now let’s take a look at the categories which would be vulnerable to elimination under this system (their list is on the right). Twelve of the twenty-two categories (only seventeen of them are immediately endangered) are Asian, and four are African. Two are Byzantine and there’s Numismatics and Psychohistory (again).

They say that “This is not intended to make a statement about the relative merits of a particular subject or area of inquiry, just to assure that the taxonomy offers a proper reflection of the broad contours of the Association’s membership.” That sounds good, but I have another reading of this, one which goes beyond the grossly outdated database functions the AHA is using to keep track of us. I think that this list indicates that the AHA is failing to actually attract and keep as members those scholars who teach outside of the core Western fields. It’s certainly not done all that well attracting Asianists to the national meeting, though I think they’ve done better lately with the American Historical Review. Nor has the AHA, for all its talk about public history and expanding the definitions of historical practice, attracted archaelogists or other scholars of physical culture. How could numismatics, one of the earliest fields tieing archaeology and history together, be on the cutting block? How could a dozen Asian fields, most of them pretty healthy as scholarly endeavors, be out of the AHA, if the AHA were really working to represent and to serve the entire historical community? Asian studies is not a secondary field, but the study of the bulk of humanity and of some of the most interesting history. When will the American Academy start treating it as such?

  1. Do I have a better idea? Yes: allow people who pick “599 – Other” to include a short description (I would expect the database could handle a couple of dozen extra characters) and staff could monitor those. When a number of “others” listing something similar reached a certain level, then the Council could consider acting. This would also have the benefit of allowing people whose taxonomies have lapsed to continue listing themselves under their old categories  ↩

  2. My neologism “Colonialogy” hasn’t caught on yet, but we might be able to correct that  ↩

China/Guest Postings/Manchukuo

Manchukuo Stamps

Posted on by Guest / 12 Comments

We welcome a guest posting by Alexander Akin, an occasional comment contributor here at Frog in a Well and currently a PhD Candidate in Harvard’s department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. -K. M. Lawson

As a fan of Prasenjit Duara’s work on Manchukuo, I have long thought that it would have been interesting if he had illustrated his discussion of that state’s efforts to legitimize itself with some of the currency or stamps that it issued. These media were among Manchukuo’s most pervasive propaganda outlets, since everyone participated in the economy in some form or other. We can find examples of everything from the resurrection of Qing-era Manchu ideology to depictions of modern industrial development, slogans related to Manchukuo’s place in Japan’s grand project to realign East Asia, and even the illustration of a cartographic “geo-body” for the fledgling state. I thought I’d post images of some of the stamps issued by Manchukuo that use imagery or wording relevant to these themes. If you want to download the images for use in teaching a class or something like that, feel free- it’s not as if the Manchukuo imperial copyright enforcers will be coming after you!
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Korea/Korea-Japan/Links/Nationalism

Korean War Criminals

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 0 Comment

Sayaka over at Prison Notebooks has been reading up on the history of Korea’s wartime B/C war criminals for a short paper she has been writing. In addition to the main paper, which I hope we will see online at some point, she has posted a few weblog entries with some observations about what is out there:

Notes on the Works on Korean War Criminals in WWII
Notes on the Works on Korean War Criminals in WWII (2)

I’m sure she would love to hear from anyone who has seen any academic work on the topic she might have missed. There seems to be less out there in the way of scholarly research than she expected (except for the writing in the recent press related to the Truth Commission which absolved most of them of their convictions).

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