Academia/China-Japan/Current/Recent Events/English/Historiography/Japan/Korea-Japan/Occupation/photography/US-Japan/War/昭和

What’s New?

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment
  • The University of Hawai’i at Manoa Center for Japanese Studies has a new collection of Occupation-era photographs. I’m struck by two things in particular: the persistence of traditional production, agriculture and fishing methods; the repatriated soldiers, who seem quite happy to be home.
  • Nothing new here: Japanese textbooks omit Japanese atrocities1 , draw fire from China, Koreas.2 However, it’s worth noting that this was from Andrew Bell, writing at the official blog of the American Historical Association. It’s nice to see Asian history getting some note, though it would be even nicer if it wasn’t the same-old, same-old. For a really fresh take on the textbook/nationalism question, I highly recommend Ian Condry’s article about alternative media and non-nationalistic historical visions in Japan.
  • Kevin Murphy noted the appearance of a new report on WWII “comfort women” and US collusion in the Occupation era “comfort stations” for US GIs. This got more attention than usual because it coincided with PM Abe’s visit to the US. Interestingly, he did apologize (repeatedly), and President Bush accepted him at his word. However, apologies have no legal weight, it seems, and the “apology fund” attempt to privatize absolution failed miserably. (Non-sexual slave laborers also denied compensation, so at least they’re consistent). You can find the whole Congressional Research Service report here.
  • In the “read it or not, you’re going to have to have an opinion” category, comes an announcement of a new broadside volley in the Atomic Bomb historiography, a bold attempt edited by Robert James Maddox to present the full array pro-bomb arguments against “revisionists.” Gar Alperovitz and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa are named as particular targets of these essays. The press release (that’s all it is, so don’t expect a balanced review) contains not the slightest hint that an honest scholar could doubt the ineffable wisdom of history as it happened, a Panglossian view with a real edge.
  • Speaking of broadsides, Vietnam War revisionist (here it’s a good thing) Mark Moyar couldn’t find a job and the usual arguments about politicization in the academy are offered by the usual suspects. Note, however: he’s applied for “more than 150” jobs in “over five years.” US history positions routinely attract 80-150 applications; I don’t know how many jobs my Americanist colleagues usually apply to in a job search year, but even in my little Asian history corner of the market I’ve had years in which I made 20 applications. He sounds like a strong candidate almost anywhere (and it sounds like he’s made the short list a fair number of times), but I’ve seen plenty of searches from both sides and the process is never a simple head-to-head c.v. weigh-off: This is what makes it hard for candidates, I admit, but it also means that it’s awfully hard to conclude anything, even from a lot of rejections. He’s teaching at a better school than I am now, and suing a top-tier program, to boot.
  • There is a high liklihood that almost two hundred Japanese Christian martyrs of the pre-seclusion era will be beatified later this year. I haven’t been able to find a press report online with more details: every report I’ve seen echoes this one in highlighting the “pacifist samurai” angle.
  • Takamatsuzuka tomb restoration work begins
  • Collaboration doesn’t pay? The South Korean government is going to seize assets owned by the descendants of collaborators going back to members of the cabinet which signed the annexation treaty in 1910. I can see this going one of three ways: it gets tied up in court and never goes any further; a very high bar is set for the definition of “collaboration”, leading to generations of debate about the historicity and utility of such definitions, not to mention considerable acrimony regarding boderline cases; a vague definition of collaboration results in a flood of cases, lawsuits, historical geneological and pseudo-historical disputes, charges of favoritism, deeper corruption and the release of massive quantities of new and interesting historical materials into the public sphere.

  1. see also this, this  ↩

  2. At the same time, China and Korea are moving ahead with joint historical projects with Japan  ↩

General/Korea

RG242: Foreigners in North Korea

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 3 Comments

There are all sorts of interesting materials in the National Archives collection of Captured North Korean Documents in record group 242 that I introduced in an earlier posting. While I’m looking through files most likely to be of use in my own dissertation research, I can’t help coming across materials that are of little use to me but which might be a great starting point for research on other North Korea related topics.

DSCF0022 For example, if you wanted to do research on issues such as migration to and from North Korea, the captured records collection includes many lists and individual files on many hundreds of foreigners (overwhelmingly Chinese and some Japanese in the files I saw) kept by North Korea’s internal affairs ministry (내무서). The files I looked through last week were mostly dated from the middle of 1947 but there appear to be a lot of files from 1949. These lists of foreigners also come from different counties throughout North Korea. They list foreign residents over the age of 18 but the files also often list family members.

A Chinese Farmer (Named is Blurred to Protect Privacy)I flipped through one pack of these internal ministry files, with perhaps around a hundred individual files in it, all of them of Chinese residents.1 Each file contained a range of information including the resident’s name, citizenship, current address, place of origin, date of entry into Korea, occupation, religion, family members, and how well they are doing (生活狀態 생활상태) with their condition being described with such words as good (良好 양호), not so good (下 하), or suffering difficulties (困難 곤란).

Not so happy Chinese farmerThe files usually had pictures as well, but over time, the pictures that had been glued to their file often became stuck to the next file and/or smudged. Those pictures I could see clearly often showed less than happy faces. The vast majority of the Chinese listed in these 1947 files I looked at were listed as farmers, and almost all of them came from Shandong province, with just a few coming from Hebei. They mostly came to Korea in the 1930s and wartime 1940s, with a smaller cluster of files with entry dates from 1917 and another group who came in during the 1920s.

Anyone interested in doing research on migration to/from Korea in the 20th century, especially those interested in Chinese and Japanese who stayed behind in North Korea, at least for the first few years, can find a great deal of useful information in these files given the considerable quantity of them. Though I have only looked at one of these file packets, there are many of them in SA 2005 all throughout box 9 (remember, this original SA box number does not correspond to any actual box number in the national archives), including items 9/3 (100pp), 9/4 (which I looked at), 9/6 (100pp), 9/13 (684pp), 9/14 (148pp), 9/15 (4pp), 9/16 (640pp), 9/18 (1300pp), 9/24 (8pp), 9/27 (188pp), 9/35 (56pp), 9/39 (278pp), and 9/43 (150pp), all of which include such files of Japanese and Chinese residents in North Korea according to the microfilm index of the collection.

  1. RG242 Captured Korean Documents SA 2009 9/4 (in Box 161)  ↩

China/Current Events/English/Imperialism

It's not Imperialism

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 7 Comments

Via Yahoo a roundup of recent stuff on China’s involvement in Africa. China of course has growing economic interests in Africa and very little interest in things like promoting democracy or whatever. Jia Qinglin is currently in Africa building international solidarity. There have been a number of complaints of late about China’s growing power in Africa, and in Ethiopia  the Ogaden National Liberation Front has killed a number of Chinese oil workers to encourage China “to refrain from entering into agreements with the Ethiopian government.”

Jia has pointed out that China’s involvement in Africa is “normal business practice on the basis of equality and mutual benefit…It is totally different from the plunder committed by colonialists in Africa.”This is pretty much the standard Chinese line. What imperialism is is always a complex question, but I was struck by how much the current Chinese leaders sould like Japanese leaders talking about Manchukuo in the 1930s. In the case of many of the Japanese they were being honest, meaning they actually believed the stuff they were peddling. I assume Jia Qinglin does as well.

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China/English/Geography/Imperialism/Mongols and Mongolia

Maps and Empire

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

Maps have been an important part of empire in China for a long time. In the Warring States period spies were always trying to steal maps, and defeated states presented maps of their territory to the victors as a sign of submission. Geographic knowledge written down in books like the Classic of Mountians and Seas was avidly collected as a way of learning the universal patterns of the universe. Needless to say there has been a lot written in the last decade or so about how cartography connects to empire, as it fits in so well with whole postmodern power/knowledge thing. To map a place is to control it, and thus empire-builders were always interested in mapping. I have not found many better visual representations of this than this map of Russian cartography on China, found on the CHGIS site.

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China/English/visual culture/Web Sites and Resources

More technological coolness

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

 

pig

This is probably not news to many of our readers, but you can now download the entire 1941 animated film Princess Iron Fan from Internet Archive. It is part of the story of Journey To the West This is of course a classic, and thus timeless. It still amazes me that it was made in China in 1941. Timeless classic or not I can think of a lot of things that might distract one from making China’s first full-length animated film in 1941.

China/Databases/English/Web Sites and Resources

China Historical GIS Data Sets Project Available

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 2 Comments

There was an announcement on H-Asia which might be of interest to historians and researchers that appreciate the power of GIS geographic information data. This Harvard program has made available for free (with registration) the download of an amazing collection of GIS data related to China’s historical borders, administrative units, etc. Below is a copy of their most recent announcement:

China Historical GIS Data sets project available, Harvard University

CHGIS China Historical Geographic Information System [Version 4]
We are pleased to announce the release of the China Historical GIS –
Version 4, providing a fully documented database of historical
administrative units in China. The new datasets may be downloaded free of
charge for academic use.

Contents of the new release include:

Updated! Time Series datasets (from 222 BCE to 1911 CE) for the region
covered by modern Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Fujian, Jiangxi, Guangdong,
and Hunan and partial coverage for Guangxi, Shandong, Sichuan, Yunnan &
Zhili

Qing Dynasty Datasets circa 1820.

Updated! Late Qing Datasets circa 1911 for the region covered by Anhui,
Fujian, Gansu, Guangdong, Guangxi, Guizhou, Hebei, Henan, Hubei, Hunan,
Jiangsu, Jiangxi, Shandong, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Yunnan, Zhejiang, Zhili
(Including more than 35,000 town and village points)

New! ChinaW Dataset (with more than 150 variables related to Cities,
County Seats, and Yamen) circa 1820-1893, produced by Regional Systems
Analysis Project (G. W. Skinner, Zumou Yue, Mark Henderson at UC Davis)

New! Physiographic Macroregions of China produced by Regional Systems
Analysis Project (G. W. Skinner, Zumou Yue, Mark Henderson at UC Davis)

Updated! CITAS 1990 data (Provinces, Prefectures, and Counties) joined
with basic census statistics.

New! USGS Geographic Names Data circa 1990 for all Provices (over 140,000
named features)

New! Digital Elevation Model plus Topographic Background Image (derived
from GTOPO-30).

Frontier Regions datasets (circa 1875 – 1900) covering areas in Tibet,
Qinghai, Xinjiang, and Mongolia, as digitized from Russian historical
maps.

Digital Scans of Southwest China Maps by Joseph Rock

The complete contents of the datasets listed above are available for free
download by registering your name, institution and email address at
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis

CD-ROM is available ….. For price and postage information please
contact CHGIS…

Editors:: Peter K. Bol [pkbol [at mark] fas.harvard.edu] and Jianxiong Ge
Executive Editors: Merrick Lex Berman [mberman [at mark] fas.harvard.edu] and Zhimin
Man

Chair, China Historical Geographic Information System Project
Center For Geographic Analysis
Institute for Quantitative Social Science
1737 Cambridge Street
Harvard University
+1 617-496-6222
Email: pkbol [at mark] fas.harvard.edu
Visit the website at http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis

Korea/Late Chosŏn/임진왜란

Sea Devils (revisited)

Posted on by Owen / 3 Comments

Professor Gari Ledyard of Columbia University has left a couple of extremely good posts on the Korean Studies Mailing List that deserve to be shared here. They also put a somewhat different perspective on the article I noted here about African mercenaries fighting alongside Ming troops during the Imjin Wars (1592-1598). His posts are in response to a question about whether Portuguese soldiers were fighting with the Chinese in late sixteenth century Korea. The first one looks at the source of the notion that Portuguese were in Chosŏn and includes an excellent translation of the relevant passage from the Sŏnjo Sillok (Veritable Records of King Sŏnjo). The second posting on the same subject deals with another passage from the Sillok regarding the ‘Sea Devils’ and also the claims about early visits to Korea by Spanish Jesuits in the late sixteenth century.

The upshot of all this is that the Sillok passage on which the article about ‘African mercenaries’ seems to have been based is rather ambiguous. While it appears unlikely that it refers to Portuguese soldiers, there is also nothing to show positively that it is talking about Africans – Gari Ledyard points out that the soldiers could be from a number of areas in south and southeast Asia as well as Africa.

Below is the translation of the passage from the Sŏnjo Sillok, reproduced with Professor Ledyard’s kind permission.
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China/Education/Historiography

Where's my check?

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 13 Comments

A lot of discussion of who China scholars in the U.S. -really- work for. (Hint, it’s not Cleo) One thread of the discussion, from Far Eastern Economic Review, via Cliopatria, asks if China Scholars have been bought off by the CCP. This focuses more on general research on contemporary China, but the point of the piece is that China scholars have become adept and not asking the type of questions that might annoy the state, and are thus complicit, at one remove perhaps, in what it does.

Another thread started on the H-Asia discussion list. Yang Bin and Thomas Dubois brought up the question of why Chinese scholars are “under-represented” in the field. Qin Shao refined the question by pointing out that Mainland Chinese scholars who got Ph.D.s in the US have often found work at smaller schools but almost none of them are in the Ivies. Andrew Field tenatively suggested that this might be the impact of the Cold War origins of China studies in the U.S., i.e. that “Mainland Chinese historians, schooled in the rigors of Marxist (Maoist?) historicism and sympathetic to the Chinese revolution of 1949, might constitute a threat to the anti-Communist agenda of the US government.” (I think he is trying to make the point less crudely than that.)

Most of the people involved in this discussion are quick to deny that they are interested in casting aspersions on anyone or creating flaky conspiracy theories. In reading all this stuff not quite implying that there is something wrong with the field I am reminded of Orwell’s observation that if the British Trotskyites really -were- in the pay of Hitler, or anyone else, they would at least occasionally have some money. Sadly, I suspect that nobody in Washington cares enough about China scholarship to do much about it.

Even more sadly I suspect that there is some truth to the suggestion that Western academics are so timid they would avoid topics for fear of annoying Beijing, even if Beijing is not actually saying anything. As China becomes a more and more ‘normal’ state and is less and less interested in controlling scholarship on a lot of topics this may not matter.

In part I think there is no problem to be explained. As Robert Hymes pointed out in the H-Asia discussion, most of the people who teach history in American universities in any field are Americans. Still, I think it is likely that part of the reason is that there really is a national, or at least regional character to academia. (I’m a native speaker of English and I find the British university system incomprehensible.) Chinese and American academics in China and America are quite different, ask different question and answer them in different ways, value different sorts of publications, teach differently and are supported by the state and society differently. Thus it seems unlikely that it would be easy to move back and forth between the two worlds, and in fact few people do. (The Japan/Non-Japan Japanese studies gap is a good example I think, as there you have two different worlds and there is no reason to think it is temporary.)

Is this parochialism? Is it good or acceptable if it is? Is it fixable or worth fixing? Is focusing on the Ivies a good way to ask this quesiton?

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