1980s/Current/Recent Events/East vs West/Economic/Economics/Japan/US-Japan

President Trump’s Historical Consciousness: Bowling Ball Edition

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

President Trump, at a recent event, recycled an old chestnut I haven’t heard in years

He accused Japan of using gimmicks to deny U.S. auto companies access to their consumers, …
“It’s the bowling ball test. They take a bowling ball from 20 feet up in the air and drop it on the hood of the car,” Trump said of Japan. “If the hood dents, the car doesn’t qualify. It’s horrible,” he said. It was unclear what he was talking about.

Apparently the reporter didn’t live through the 1980s, because it’s precisely the kind of urban legend that flourished in the heyday of the trade wars.

It’s true that Japan did invoke standards to limit American market penetration – “non-tariff barriers” was a term we heard a lot in the 1980s – but more often than not the problem was more informal barriers: consumer tastes (or biases; there’s a subtle difference between Japanese shopping preferences for uniform and unblemished fruit, say, and Japanese myths about local rice being both superior or about Japanese not buying American meat due to biological differences), closed distributor systems, and incompatibility with local needs. Cars, for example: in addition to weak consumer demand and the complexities of distribution and marketing, US producers never seemed interested in modifying its vehicles for the literally left-side-of-the-road Japanese system.

Then there’s areas where Japanese products were just better than anything produced in the US: cameras, especially digital ones; cell phones (in the 1990s, anyway); kitchen appliances (where US brands also focused on bigger, which was a terrible match to small Japanese kitchens, and the most important ones – rice pots and hot water kettles – weren’t made in America at all).

Apparently Trump went on to complain about Japanese car manufacturers not doing enough in the US, which hasn’t been remotely true since the late 1980s.

I have a theory about President Trump: I don’t think he’s changed his mind about anything, or perhaps even learned anything, since the 1980s. It’s an interesting example of how someone’s consciousness of the world gets fixed at a certain time and everything else gets filtered through that body of knowledge (or “knowledge”) from that point forward. Doesn’t happen to everybody about everything, perhaps, but it’s remarkable how on many social and economic issues Trump harkens back to 1980s tropes and images. His depiction of urban blight, especially of gangs, are classic 1970s-1980s issues, thoroughly covered in the media and entertainment of the day. (and his view of guns and police seems to owe a lot to the “Death Wish” and “Dirty Harry” franchises) His use of “cyber” for online technologies had its peak in 2000, though it was eclipsed by “internet” in the mid-1990s. His view of trade as bilateral relationships (in which deficits and surpluses matter a lot) is decidedly pre-WTO (possibly pre-GATT, but trade wars definitely were a thing in the 1980s). He uses other outdated language, e.g.. His view of how the economy can and should function marks manufacturing as the height of productivity and profitability, and still takes autarkic independence (in energy and, now, steel) as a high priority.

Obviously, President Trump hasn’t literally learned nothing since the 1980s – his facility with twitter and reality TV mark him as a 21st century figure – but on fundamental issues of how the world works and what the critical issues are, it’s not clear to me that anything that’s happened in the last quarter-century has made much of an impression on him.

Japan/Teaching/江戸

Teaching Tokugawa math

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

Do you teach Tokugawa Japan? If so you probably spend some time talking about the rise of popular education, the terakoya temple schools etc. I found a good book to help explain the rise of math education. It is Fukagawa, H., & Rothman, T. (2008). Sacred mathematics : Japanese temple geometry. Princeton: Princeton University Press. The book itself seems to be more aimed at people who  like solving math problems, but there are a lot of pictures that can help you teach about why people wanted to get educated. Here is a merchant who has prospered because he has learned math.

Why does math help? Well, here is an oil merchant who has measure out some oil using two ladles of the wrong sizes. I bet math would help him!

Ugh. A story problem. If I have to do story problems I am not going to be an oil merchant. Maybe I will grow up to be a ruthless bandit!

Bandits dividing a piece of stolen cloth. Maybe everyone needs math.

That math is useful for lots of people in a commercial society is not surprising, although the pictures help. What I found most interesting were the shrine geometry problems. Apparently there were math groups that would show up at shrines and try to solve the posted problems. Here is one of the placards

A later version

and a modernized version

They look like geometry proofs to me.

I would have liked more social history on these math groups. Was there some religious significance to them? I assume that to some extent math groups served as social networks, like poetry groups, but I would like more on that. They mention that women sometimes solved these, but little else on the make-up of the groups. This being Tokugawa Japan I bet there are several 12-volume studies of these math groups, but nothing I could quickly google led me to an explanation of the social background.  There is at least some info here Noel J. Pinnington. (2009). Sacred Mathematics: Japanese Temple Geometry (review). Monumenta Nipponica, 64(1), 174-177.

Posts

Fame! and journalism

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Don’t you hate it when a good bit of teaching material comes to your attention just a little too late? I hate it when that happens. In this case the problem is that last unit, in Introduction to Asian Studies, we were talking about Journalism. How it gets created, and how you can use it to understand Asia but need to be careful with it etc. We read some sections from  Joris Luyendijk. People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East. Soft Skull Press, 2006. He talks about the wires, and how a handful of stories get re-published over and over again, and how being a journalist is sometimes just trying to get the proper by-line for a story or a good quote.  He also talks about the frustration of being a good journalist trying to get editors to run stories that don’t fit their expectations.

As luck would have it, there is an Indiana PA. byline running all over the world right now. The story is from the AP. “A library without books? Universities purging dusty volumes” by Michael Rubinkam.

The basic gist of it is that universities are getting rid of dusty, worthless old books. Not just the regular weeding they always do, a new paradigm of library hood or something like that. Our library is mentioned because we are currently in the process of tossing about 1/3 of our books to make room for study tables. Also, they have put red stickers on (some of) the books that they are tossing, which makes for good pictures. As the article puts it “Bookshelves are making way for group study rooms and tutoring centers, “makerspaces” and coffee shops, as libraries seek to reinvent themselves for the digital age.” Our Library Dean is leading the charge, and establishing himself as a leader in the field! Some versions of the article mention digital repositories like Hathi Trust (which we are not a member of, and never will be), and our Library Dean has already pointed out that books will still be available through interlibrary loan from real universities. The article is not really all that good on the issues facing modern libraries.

Needless to say, a story like that would not be complete without a quote from some fuddy duddy old professor who likes books. I gave him a quote “We’re going to throw away as many of them as the library can get away with, which is not a strategy,” said IUP history professor Alan Baumler.

You can see this quote in my old hometown paper

Chicago Tribune

In the Fresno Bee and the LA Times

In both the Washington Post and the Washington Times

It’s even going international. Mainichi has picked it up in Japan. So has the Borneo Bulletin. The Arab Times apparently puts me in the category of “print-loving scholars.”

I will probably talk about this in class tomorrow, as an example of how the same story gets re-used over and over. Of course one reason I find this so cool is that I have been quoted in the Daily Mail.

For those of you not familiar with the Mail, here it is explained by Fry and Laurie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM3mOlERzQc

Or, if you want to be a bit more highbrow, by the Right Honorable James George Hacker, Baron Hacker of Islington, KG, PC, BSc (Lond.), Hon. DCL (Oxon.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M

Start at 1:00 if you are impatient

 

And, of course

The Beatles

China/Film/Han Dynasty/Qin

The Last Supper (2012): Xiang Yu Overthrows the Qin in order to…protect Diversity?

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 1 Comment

I’ve been listening to the lectures given by Prof. Ou Fan Leo Lee (李歐梵) for his Coursera course Classics of Chinese Humanities: Guided Readings from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.1 I quite like the design of this very short course which, instead of discussing the most common classic texts or issues, gives you four little self-contained units that offers Prof. Lee a chance combine an introduction of some key introductory themes but also his own unique argument-driven ideas.

The first unit is on “The True Face of Hero”2 and uses Sima Qian’s “The Basic Annals of Xiang Yu” as its main text to discuss what Prof. Lee sees as a good example of a (tragic) heroic warrior tradition in Chinese literature that is often overshadowed by more dominant Confucian narratives of loyal ministers.3

Xiang Yu (項羽) was a military figure who rose out of chaos of the rebellions against the Qin dynasty and, together with a band of allies, including Liu Bang, the founder of the Han dynasty, brings about the ultimate destruction of the Qin before himself being killed by Liu Bang. The final part of the unit traces the long cultural legacy of the story of the rise and fall of Xiang Yu, whose final farewell to his consort is the story behind the play 霸王别姬, which is at the heart of the famous Chinese film Farewell my Concubine. There are a number of other films that more directly tell the story of Xiang Yu, including The Great Conqueror’s Concubine (西楚霸王), White Vengeance (鴻門宴) and The Last Supper (王的盛宴)

From the standpoint of the cultural history, two of the best remembered moments in the story of the rivalry between Xiang Yu and Liu Bang is the attempt to kill the latter at the “Feast at Hong Gate” and the final farewell and suicide of Xiang Yu and (though this is not included in Sima Qian’s version, as far as I can see) his consort.4

On the other hand, I think that what your typical document-loving historian finds most moving in the story, is Sima Qian’s claim for the contrast between the conduct of Liu Bang and Xiang Yu when each of them enter the capital of the defeated Qin: Xianyang. The former enters the capital before Xiang Yu can get there, supposedly much thanks to the fact that he, “forbade his men to plunder or seize prisoners” on his way there, leading to the rapid surrender of Qin forces. Once there, Sima Qian has him say that he did not, “lay a finger on a single thing,” “sealed up the storehouses containing Qin’s treasures and wealth,” and proclaim an end to the harsh laws of the empire.5 When Liu Bang turns over the capital at the arrival of the huge army of his lord, the grumpy Xiang Yu “led his troops west and massacred the inhabitants of Xianyang, the capital city, killing Ziying, the king of Qin, who had already surrendered, and setting fire to the palaces of Qin; the fire burned for three months before it went out. Then he gathered up all the goods, treasures, and waiting women, and started east.”6

In her wonderful work on The Five Confucian Classics, Michael Nylan argues that the famous “Burning of the Books legend” that claims that, under the Qin dynasty, there was a vast loss of classic texts and annals “does not bear close scrutiny.”7 Instead, she argues, we should pay more attention to the huge loss of texts that undoubtedly occurred at this later moment in 206 BCE when Xiang Yu burned the imperial palaces, and presumably, the imperial library. In Sima Qian’s account of Xiang Yu, though clearly he had some sympathy for the tragic hero, there are also plenty of other descriptions of massacres he ordered, as there are, though fewer in number, for Liu Bang.

Which brings me to the 2012 film, The Last Supper, the English title being a reference not to Jesus but the Hong gate banquet (unless there is a Judas reference here, but there too many Judases to make this a meaningful reference). The most unfortunate omission in the depiction of the famous banquet, I thought, was the Sima Qian’s claim that Liu Bang slipped away from the banquet of death when he stepped out to use the latrine. Instead of reproducing this great vulgar and humorous moment of the classic history, the film has Liu Bang explain that he pretended to be drunk and ran off. However, more interestingly, the director Lu Chuan, who also made the remarkable Nanjing massacre film City of Life and Death (南京！南京！), offers an entirely new take on Xiang Yu. When Xiang Yu executes the last ruler of the Qin, he delivers the following speech as he divides the spoils of the former empire among his generals:

這裡曾經是秦王的宮殿，很多人勸我留在這裡，我不會，我會燒掉它，省得大家惦記，省得還有人也想當秦始皇，我們推翻了秦，不是為了做下一個秦始皇，秦始皇統一了天下，他要求天下人穿一樣顏色的衣服，坐一樣的車，寫一樣的文字，他要把天下千千萬萬顆不一樣的心，變成一個…..

“This was the Qin king’s palace. Many people have suggested that I live here. I cannot. I will burn it down to avoid the possibility that someone will become another Qin Emperor. We didn’t overthrow the Qin to make another Qin emperor. The Qin Emperor unified the world and demanded that all must wear the same color, ride the same carriages, and write the same [characters/language]. He wanted to take the thousands upons thousands of different hearts of the world and turn them into one…”

This depiction of Xiang Yu as a generous proponent of decentralized rule is entirely at odds with Sima Qian’s critique of Xiang Yu’s arrogant desire to “make himself a dictator.” Later on Sima Qian has Gao Qi and Wang Ling tell Liu Bang that, unlike the new Han emperor, Xiang Yu, “was jealous of worth and ability…No matter what victories were achieved in battle, he gave his men no reward; no matter what lands they won, he never shared with them the spoils. This is why he lost possession of the world.”8 Sima Qian claims Xiang Yu’s reason for not staying in Xianyang was due to his yearning to return home to his home in the southern kingdom of Chu.

Instead, in the movie version Xiang Yu murders his way to the northwest to overthrow the Qin wants in order to reverse the massive standardization campaigns of the empire. His goal, rather than winning heroic valor, military glory, and feeding his insatiable hunger for power, is a destruction of the insidious cultural hegemony of the empire.

I can’t help but wonder if there is a far more contemporary political message being made here through the speech of this new Xiang Yu. Instead of the Qin, is it the Communist party’s goal of “uniting the hearts of the people” that is the real target here, especially with respect to the control over art? As Mao puts it in the 1942 “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art,”

“The purpose of our meeting today is precisely to ensure that literature and art fit well into the whole revolutionary machine as a component part, that they operate as powerful weapons for uniting and educating the people and for attacking and destroying the enemy, and that they help the people fight the enemy with one heart and one mind.” (帮助人民同心同德地和敌人作斗争)

Just as Xiang Yu’s speech is warming up to this theme, the film turns away to the reflections of Liu Bang on the affair as we see him prance through a field of memory. Curiously, if you watch closely you’ll notice a gap between what you can make out as Xiang Yu’s voice fades and Liu Bang’s comes in and what is in either the Chinese or English subtitles (at least the ones I could find). The last key audible phrase of Xiang Yu’s speech, and the one that is most biting politically, is completely left out of the transcript:

他要把天下千千萬萬顆不一樣的心，變成一個 “He wanted to take the thousands upons thousands of different hearts of the world and turn them into one…”

  1. Neat tip: if you have the Coursera app on your phone, you don’t need to watch the videos of the lectures, which is nice if you just want to listen to the lectures while at the gym or going for a run. It plays the videos fine when the phone is in another app, or “sleeping,” and even automatically starts the next lecture in a set when one is finished.  ↩

  2. Indefinite and definite articles are so often dropped in the English spoken in Hong Kong, elsewhere in overseas Chinese English, and indeed many variants of English, I’ve almost stopped noticing it. I confess, I hope it is something that will spread to English everywhere (except for optional emphasis) as it would certainly make the language easier to learn.  ↩

  3. You can find this in Burton Watson’s translation in Records of the Grand Historian: Han Dynasty I, 17-48.  ↩

  4. The story of the banquet is told in Watson’s translation of Sima Qian’s history on pp30-32, and briefly again in “The Basic Annals of Emperor Gaozu” p63. The farewell, in Sima Qian’s version, is on pp44-45.  ↩

  5. Watson’s translation, in Xiang Yu’s annals on p29 and in Gaozu annals pp61-62  ↩

  6. Xiang Yu annals, p33  ↩

  7. Nylan, Michael. The Five Confucian Classics. Yale University Press, 2014, 29.  ↩

  8. “Basic Annals of Xiang Yu p48 “Basic Annals of Emperor Gaozu” p76  ↩

China/Classics/Games/Philosophy

Encountering Classical Chinese Philosophy Through Translation and a Text Adventure Game

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 1 Comment

Over winter break I usually spend a good deal of time with my nephew, codename Loke, now 11 years-old. Over the past few years, I have hidden a bonus Christmas present somewhere for him and developed a puzzle that reveals its location. I began with a cryptography puzzle that involved decrypting a message using a double transposition cipher for which the key was supplied. The second year’s puzzle was called “The Bestiary” and involved chasing down references to lots of monsters in various literary traditions and using their names to spell the location of the prize.

The mysterious bamboo slipsThis time I created a two part puzzle: one involving a translation exercise, and the other, a classical Chinese philosophy-inspired text adventure in which the translations were required to win the game and reveal the location of his prize. I first gave Loke a printed out image of fifteen bamboo slips with snippets from Kongzi, Mengzi, Laozi, and Zhuangzi in classical Chinese, along with a glossary tailored to these snippets. Although the Taekwondo-practicing Loke has been learning some Hangul of late, and a bit of Spanish at school, he has never studied Chinese or Classical Chinese, so it was important that even mangled translations could be used to help him in-game. I was delighted to confirm that one should never underestimate the ability of an eleven year-old to use their intuition to transform the product of a juxtaposition of matched-up characters-to-definitions into an intelligible sentence, and then, when asked, guess the philosophical message of that snippet (often not obvious in isolation) in most cases. Loke translated the fifteen slips, on average 2-3 per sitting and around 15 minutes per sitting, over the course of two weeks.

The inspiration for the second part of the puzzle was as a project to help teach myself the Python programming language. My code is an amateur mess but it works and it was lots of fun to recreate that nice 1980s text adventure feeling. There are a number of open source starter kits out there to help you create a text adventure game in Python. I used the lovely bwx-adventure Python module created and used by a school in San Francisco called SF Brightworks to help children create their own adventure, and modified it a bit to get it to run online in a browser through Trinket.

When Loke finished his fifteen translations, I gave him a web link to his game. His goal, essentially, is to explore the game and hunt down his fifteen quotes within it on signs, scrolls, and rock carvings found in the locations of the game. When he finds a match, he makes a note of a letter found with each quote. If he can find his way past various challenges to a special “machine room,” guarded by a tomb demon, he can input the code into the machine and it will spit out the location of his prize in the real world.

Loke has, as of this posting, explored about half the game, and identified about half of his translated quotes (along with a few misidentifications, which I hope he will spot when he finds the proper matches). As with puzzles in previous years, he has moments of excitement and enthusiasm for the puzzle, after which he puts it down only to return days, weeks, or months later. I was certainly no different at his age, and I can’t pretend my text adventure can compare to the lure of his joys in Minecraft (I decided not to develop the game in Minecraft, despite lots of great options for this, partly because I don’t think he would not be able to resist the urge to beautify the horribly newb work of his ancient uncle).

As he explores the game Loke is encountering lots of other quotes from the Chinese classics (citations for the translations used can be access by typing “about” in the game or also here), and while wandering through the domains of Kongzi (Confucius), Mengzi (Mencius), Zhuangzi, and Loazi, he has the opportunity to meet and talk to a range of interesting characters in addition to the main four, including but not limited to Mengzi’s mother, Ban Zhao, Mozi, Huizi, the Robber Zhi in monkey form (who will steal your stuff), a giant tortoise, a cook named Meng Shen, Jesus (who can be found hanging out with the Daoists), and a frog (take a stab at where it can be found).

I have created a generic version of the game so that anyone can play. You can also modify the final victory message, or create your own gamification of the Chinese classics with the code in this trinket, or via the code repository at github. The game, including a link to the bamboo slips and glossary can be played here:

The Hall of Sages Adventure Game

Cultural/Culture/Guides/Japanese/Public History/Web Sites/Web Sites and Resources

A brief note on Google Culture

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

Google Culture is apparently producing some original content: “A brief history of Kimono”

https://shinpaideshou.wordpress.com/2018/01/19/fun-link-friday-a-brief-history-of-kimono/

It’s… ok, but not fantastic. Pretty, yes, and some decent history. But just on a quick survey I’d note two fundamental errors:

  • the historical sections are illustrated by anachronistic Tokugawa-modern kimono, rather than historically appropriate images. It’s not like there’s a shortage of classical or medieval portraiture or other materials that could be used.
  • There’s at least one page on which a legend (about sword-resistant kimono dyes) is presented almost as if it could be factual.

There’s no citations or sources, either, that I can see.

China/Han Dynasty/Philosophy

Advice from Xu Gan in the Balanced Discourses

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 0 Comment

Over the holidays I had a chance to read John Makeham’s translation of Xu Gan’s (170-217 CE) late Han dynasty Balanced Discourses 中論 (Ctext).1 The work is a collection of philosophical essays written at a time when the Eastern Han dynasty was on the verge of collapse. In addition to helpful introductions by both Makeham and Dang Shengyuan, the text was a delight to read thanks to the side-by-side Chinese and English texts and even more so because of Makeham’s wonderful notes, which go into all sorts of delightful tangents beyond the immediate text so that the reader may come away having learned exactly how tallies 符 were used for contracts and issuing orders in early China (p301), the three different types of ming 命 fate during the Han (p309), an explanation of the five skills of archery (p315), and the six classes of script (p316). I confess, in some of Xu Gan’s essays, I found the notes more interesting than Xu Gan’s grumpy school master moralizing. A few thoughts on two of the chapters:

Ch 3. Cultivating the Fundamental 脩本 (Ctext)

This chapter include’s Xu Gan’s take on an old debate on human nature. The great Confucian figure of Mengzi believed that our nature is good (3A1, 6A6), found in all of us in the form of sprouts of benevolence that needed careful nurturing in a good environment. It can be directed right or left, but naturally ran downhill [towards goodness] (6A2). He said we should not be surprised to find that those lacking any “constant livelihood” would fail to have a “constant heart” and that most of us are gentle in years of plenty but violent in years of poverty (6A16). Mengzi is often juxtaposed with Xunzi who believed that “people’s nature is bad,” (Ch 23) but that with a little “steaming and bending” thanks to education (Ch 1), anyone can be put on the path to righetousnessness. If Mengzi was fortunate enough to never meet a psychopath in his life, Xunzi’s view always puzzled me a bit as having the opposite of the “Problem of Evil” – that is, the problem of where goodness comes from (or, in his case, the original impetus towards ritual as a way to offer constraint upon us) if it is the case that we all naturally delight in evil. Did we all stumble onto a few sacrificial vessels and instruments, and suddenly discover restraint and goodness?

Xu Gan offers a nice middle ground to this problem (if you are into this sort of moral reasoning) by choosing a position between Mengzi and Xunzi:

Pearls contain grains of sand and jade harbors flaws. This is their nature. A good craftsman works on them to purify their natures, making them appear as if they had alway been thus. Thus when one sees these two things after they have been purified, one can know that the virtue of humaneness is able to be refined.2

夫珠之含礫，瑾之挾瑕，斯其性與良工為之以純其性，若夫素然，故觀二物之既純，而知仁德之可粹也。

That is to say, we are neither all benevolently flowing water, nor pieces of wicked wood waiting to be bent, but imperfect creatures that need to get the wabi-sabi whacked out of us. Mengzi has a rich sociological approach to virtue in his emphasis on economic well-being and environmental influences on our conduct but is perhaps too optimistic in his evaluation of the universality of empathy and Xunzi has his “the problem of good” Xu Gan, on the other hand, runs into trouble when he moves from individual to society, with a pretty problematic explanation for why things are just awful in the world of the imploding Han dynasty: his concept of bianshu (變數):

In times of order, practictioners of good reap good fortune, while wrongdoors meet with misfortune. In times of chaos, however, practitioners of good do not reap good fortune and wrongdoers do not meet with misfortune. This is caused by departures from regularities.3

世之治也，行善者獲福，為惡者得禍；及其亂也，行善者不獲福，為惡者不得禍，變數也。

Normally, things work the way they should, do-gooders get the goodies. But in ages of chaos, the cosmic correspondence between good deeds and lives of fortune breaks down. In a way, this is Xunzi’s problem up-scaled: that of origins. The great early Western Han dynasty historian Sima Qian once lamented the seeming senseless injustice in the sad story of the starvation of the virtuous figures of Bo Yi and Shu Qi, and thus the presumed lack of a grand moral order standing behind human affairs but it his despair may have helped him build us such a powerful and multi-sided narrative of his past.4 Xu Gan, on the other hand, offers order 治 as a kind of magnetic force that sets the moral poles in their rightful direction. But if it is the 善者, who while reaping their good fortune, are busy maintaining the 世之治, then what brings about the 亂 that turns this on its head? Of course, from the perspective of our own times, we have all heard descriptions of the horrors of our time in similar fatalistic terms, while others have been shouting for years that it was in those very “times of order” that there were plenty of wrongdoers who failed to meet with misfortune, and deep systemic flaws that could use more than a little polishing. In other words, far less than his ancient predecessors of Mengzi, or even the Daoist Zhuangzi, Xu Gan fails, in his work, to offer much of a structural analysis of social change.

8. An Examination of Disputation 覈辯 (Ctext)

One of my favorite passages in the 中論, and also one that Makeham reproduces in his introduction, is Xu Gan’s discussion of disputation. Debate is described in early Chinese texts as a zero-sum game of winners and losers and Xu Gan doesn’t contradict this idea, but there is a section of the chapter on disputation (辯) which shows rather more sensitivity to the relationship between two committed discussants.

Disputation is about persuading people in their hearts; it is not about verbal submission. Hence disputation is to articulate distinctions, and also to separate and distinguish different categories of affairs skillfully, so as to arrange them clearly. Disputation does not mean being quick-witted in one’s words and speech to talk over people’s heads…5

夫辯者、求服人心也，非屈人口也。故辯之為言別也，為其善分別事類而明處之也

And again a bit further down:

Deriving pleasure from letting the other person complete what he has to say, and being skilled at bringing forth the intention behind the other person’s words enables each discussant to achieve fully their wishes, and each interlocutor to understand what the other speaker is saying…6

樂盡人之辭，善致人之志，使論者各盡得其願，而與之得解

This is not the rhetorician’s toolkit, but a step back from the point-scoring to appreciate the pleasure one can take in the other’s finished thought. He points out how rare it is that any exchange with someone will produce the change of heart one is aiming for, “…would he be likely to look for victory in a single round of argument?” As I reflect on my own goals for self-improvement in the coming year, I found myself reflecting on room for improvement in my own impatience in conversation on matters I am passionate about. I shall endeavor to heed Xu Gan’s advice to 樂盡人之辭 a little more.

Alas, Xu Gan doesn’t exactly end the chapter on a warm and fuzzy note. After a critique of glibness, he rants against the many wrong people in the world, and reminds us that, in the good old days, those “who recorded what is scandalous and spread it widely, or who followed what is wrong as if it were beneficial were…put to death. This is because, by sowing doubt among the masses and confusing the people, they caused disorder to spill over the supreme way…”7

  1. Xu, Gan. John Makeham trans. Balanced discourses. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.  ↩

  2. Ch 3 p39  ↩

  3. p47 ↩

  4. Ch 61 of Shiji. Stephen Durrant discusses this in his The Cloudy Mirror: Tension and Conflict in the Writings of Sima Qian. SUNY Press, 1995, 20-23.  ↩

  5. Ch 8, p99  ↩

  6. Ch 8, p101  ↩

  7. Ch 8 p103  ↩

Posts

Syllabus blogging for Spring 2018

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 4 Comments

This is way too early for me, but I thought I would procrastinate on grading a bit by thinking about what I will be doing in Spring and asking for some advice.

My classes are

Asia 200 Introduction to Asian Studies

In this class I introduce our Asian Studies students (and anyone else who cares) to Japan, sociology, Korea, history, India, literature,  etc. Old vesions here, here and here.There are usually 5 books/units, with the goal of covering various parts of geographic Asia (including the Middle East) and different disciplinary traditions. Students are encouraged to read all five books, although they only write about two of them. Obviously they all need to be cheap paperbacks. I usually pair each book up with a couple of articles/chapters from a different country/discipline, and that is the place where I could use the most help.

Image result for Kapur, Akash. India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India..

Kapur, Akash. India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India.. Riverhead Books, 2013. India/Journalism

The first unit is always on journalism and how good journalists can help you understand Asia and bad ones….can’t. This is a nice book on the modern transformation of India. I need at least a couple short things to go with it. Since this one is about India and journalism I guess I would want to pair it up with an academic article/chapter about rapid social change in….Taisho Japan or something. Maybe re-use  Folding Beijing? There are many options, so I am sure lots of people can suggest stuff.

Image result for King, Maggie. An Excess Male Harper Voyager, 2017.

King, Maggie. An Excess Male Harper Voyager, 2017. Literature/China

A Science Fiction novel about a 20-minutes in the future China where the state starts pushing a new family structure due to the lack of men.  I like the idea having them read science fiction for the literature section, since they all really like contemporary stuff and this forces them to think about the historical development of societies while also dealing with a lot of contemporary issues like gay rights, the social credit scheme etc.

I think I will have them read some of Matt Sommer’s book on polygamy in the Qing. Sommer, Matthew H. Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China: Survival Strategies and Judicial Interventions. California, 2015. Besides the fact that it is a great book, it does bring a bit of a pre-modern flavor to the class. As a historian I like to think that understanding Asia involves understanding things that happened before 1800, but that is always a hard sell.  Maybe bits of White, Merry. Perfectly Japanese: Making Families in an Era of Upheaval. California, 2002. for the evolution of families?

Image result for Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. Pantheon, 2004.

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. Pantheon, 2004. Manga/Iran

Wait, Manga are not Literature? Well at least this semester they are not. I like the idea of putting in a manga/manhua/graphic novel unit given that that so many students are drawn to the study of Asia through them, and they rock. Persopolis is the obvious choice, since it is good and pulls us away from Japan. I suspect I will require a bit of McCloud, although if I could find a more Manga-oriented version of that it would be good. Then I need some other stuff. Barefoot Gen seems obvious, but there must be something less obvious. I was thinking of Nick Stember’s translation of Manhua Journey to the West, (I did a paper on that once) but that leads me down a lot of rabbit holes, and add-on readings should be easier. Any ideas? There has to be a good historical Japanese manga I could use.

The Film Unit

There is always a unit on films and the students do a presentation of a film they pick themselves. I am leaning towards Paradise Now (two Palestinian friends try to decide if they should become suicide bombers) and Not One Less (Young girl faces the problems of developing China) Maybe do a depressing twin bill of Turtles Can Fly and Grave of the Fireflies? Any suggestions welcome. Although none of the films mentioned here fit, I usually try to include a comedy. Far too many student think that Asia, and especially Asian films, are all depressing things about oppressed concubines and peasants. I often use Let the Bullets Fly and Taxing Woman’s Return, but I could use other suggestions of good, teachable, Asian comedies.

Image result for Constable, Nicole. Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Migrant Workers, Cornell, 2007.Anthropology/Hong Kong/S.E. Asia

Constable, Nicole. Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Migrant Workers, Cornell, 2007.Anthropology/Hong Kong/S.E. Asia

I always try to get them to read one or two  academic monographs. This one of course deals with migrant labor in HK, and gives me Southeast Asia cred as well. I have a collection of other readings about this, so I should be fine, although I suppose something more political science or sociology -ish would be good. I will mention that I hate anthropology. When I am casting around for good books to use in this class I look for topics that seem interesting to students, usually contemporary and both easy to identify with and analytical. Far too many of them are by anthropologists. Why do they do all the cool stuff?

Image result for atkins, E. Taylor. Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945. California, 2010. Japan/Korea/History

Atkins, E. Taylor. Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945.  California, 2010. Japan/Korea/History

Probably the most academic unit, where we look at the invention of tradition. We also get some Korea content, which is good since a lot of the students are into Korea. I can think of lots of readings to tie to this, but most of them are China things, so any suggestions from the rest of Asia would be good.

HIST 436 Japan 1500-1850 Early Modern Japan

This is an Early Modern Japan class going from the Onin War or so to the end of Tokugawa. I ended up splitting Japan into two parts as the Early Modern stuff seems to lend itself better to a social/cultural history approach. This is the first time I am teaching it as a regular history class. For what it’s worth, here is the original course outline from the proposal.

So, how to teach a class like this? The textbook, obviously, is

Image result for Totman, Conrad. Early Modern Japan

Totman, Conrad. Early Modern Japan. California, 1995.

This is the only choice for teaching this class and the book that encouraged me to split the Japan/China classes in two. As you would expect from Totman it does a lot with environmental history, but it is really good on everything. If only the China field had a book like this.

They will also read

Image result for Ikegami, Eiko. Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese

Ikegami, Eiko. Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture. Cambridge, 2005.

I was thinking of using her samurai book, but that is a bit too modern (although less theoretical) and this one pushes back a bit earlier than Totman and is a bit more cultural. I will no doubt have them skip the first theoretical part to start with but I hope to be able to get back to it, since her emphasis on networks makes a nice contrast to the normal focus on Tokugawa as imposing control on society. Picking this book is part of my continued attempt to figure out how to teach upper division classes. (Many years before the mast, still thinking about it.) They have to read at least one monograph, but I am not really satisfied with the standard textbook/couple of monographs/maybe toss in a primary source model. I think I will let them each pick a monograph and an article/ primary source (from here or here) to read in addition to these. I have often used this Choose Your Own Adventure model for classes, and while I like it I also find it frustrating. You have to get them to engage early and pick out what they want to do before they are sure what the class is about. I have tried having them come up with a contract (this is what I will read/do) and probably will do something like that again. Any suggestions about managing this, or books/articles to recommend are welcome.

HIST 498 -Drugs in the Modern World

This is a topics class for history majors where they do a big (Huge, 15-20 pages!) research paper as the capstone of their time here. Although there will be lots of Asian content here (opium, tea, etc.) the class will actually go all the way back to the sugar islands and Mintz looking at how production, consumption and understanding of the “drug foods” were all tied together and from the early modern empires and their reliance on drugs to all the modern anti-drug crusades.

The only assigned book is

Image result for Courtwright, David T. Forces of Habit : Drugs and the Making of the Modern World

Courtwright, David T. Forces of Habit : Drugs and the Making of the Modern World Harvard, 2002.

but each of them will be presenting on a monograph they choose on some aspect of the topic. I know some of these already, but if anyone can suggest good books on growing coffee in Java or drinking tea in Korea or cigarettes in North Africa that would be great. I have taught this class before, but only looking at Asia. This time I have to do it as a global class, so that will bring in a lot more possibilities. On the one hand I am really excited about teaching this class because I actually know something about this topic. On the other hand, it is a really broad theme, so it gives students lots of chances to get lost in their research projects. Fortunately, I am sure they will all get started early, work steadily, and come talk to me if they are having problems, so it should work out ok.

 

 

Teaching/visual culture

Teaching images- Glimpses of Modern China

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Do you follow Glimpses of Modern China ( 秋海棠民國史地 ) on Facebook? You should, since they post all sorts of interesting images and videos you can teach with. Or that pose interesting research questions.

Did you know that China used to have different time zones? I  did not.

Here is a seal captured from a Japanese military unit in 1944. If you are teaching some sort of class where you want to talk about seals as a symbol of authority and authenticity (rather than crowns or signatures or whatever) this would be a good thing to use.

Did you ever mention in class the fact that Sun Yat-sen compared his death to that of Jesus? (I think I got that from Bergere.) Well, here is an illustration

Here is a Chiang Ching-kuo pic I used in class today. Chiang looking like a goofy grandpa, rather than the spartan/fascist look his dad favored.

And here is a parody of his dad’s look

Here is a nice video of communes pledging insane crop yields during the Great Leap

 

And finally, a couple I can’t figure out how to use. A phonograph picture

And one of the oddest Shanghai advertising posters I have seen. Chinese amazons, I guess.

Books/Republican/Revolution/Teaching

Teaching Revolutionary China : China 1927: Memoir of a Debacle

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

A book that seems to have worked well for me in my teaching is Zhu Qihua China : China 1927: Memoir of a Debacle

The class was History of Modern China,, syllabus here

I was hoping that the book would draw students into “Revolutionary China” i.e. the China that was going to be transformed by an act of violence (physical, political or social) into a New China. The book itself is a memoir of Zhu’s participation in the Northern Expedition of 1926-27. He was a Left Guomindang/CCP type who worked as a propaganda officer with the troops of the western line of march i.e. headed to Wuhan.

It is a lively enough book, with some shooting and excitement, although does drag a bit in places, and lacks the either the clear plot of a fictional narrative or the “wartime absurdity” of a more literary memoir. Although Zhu is in some respects the The Good Soldier Švejk, he is not really aware of it. Instead, he is a dedicated revolutionary who is happy to commit his life to saving China. He does a lot of name-dropping (He meets Mao, Zhou Enlai, and lots of other important people) but the point of assigning the book is not to give a narrative of the Northern Expedition.

The main use of the book is to portray a revolutionary cadre and the contradictions of the revolution. Zhu is propaganda official who gives speeches, organizes groups and publishes things. He also engages in office politics and criticizes all of his rival units who are just going through the motions and trying to profit from the revolution. He could be Chairman Mao criticizing the bureaucratization of the party sometimes.

Although he (and the students) may sometimes doubt how much good his propaganda is doing, he does take a broad view of what he is work, and what the revolution is. He both drawn to the peasant Red Spear rebels and contemptuous of their political backwardness. (The masses are such a disappointment sometimes.) He talks a lot about his admiration for female comrades who were willing to abandon everything  for the revolution, and he is aware of how much more they are risking than he is. He also spends a lot of time speculating about their sleeping arrangements and trying to romance them. He never seems clear on the difference between a  revolutionary cadre and a traveling member of the traditional literati. We visit a lot of scenic spots and eat a lot of good food in this book. He is part of a revolutionary army that sometimes behaves like a warlord army, and he is aware of this.

I think the students enjoyed it, but more importantly, I got a good set of papers out of it. This was in part because they are good group of students, but also because the book gives you so many ways to get into interesting topics. It is the most readable introduction to the contradictions and of being a revolutionary that I know of.

1945-1950/1960s/1970s/1980s/Colonial/Current/Recent Events/Imperialism/Japan/Korea/Korea-Japan/North Korea/US-Korea

“North Korea: Hangover of the 20th Century”

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 2 Comments

Missouri Southern State, Pittsburg State’s rival/sister school across the state line in Joplin, does “international semesters” in the Fall, and this year the theme is Korea. They invited me to present a talk, and I’m kind of proud of the title I came up with. A lot of things could be thought of as historical hangovers: might be a good theme for a series! Here’s the short version:

North Korea is often portrayed as a ‘rogue state’ and ‘unpredictable’ but like any other state it has a history which has to be taken into account to make sense of its present. Throughout the 20th century, Northern Korea has been on the front lines between empires, and between imperialists and liberators. The end of the Cold War globally has not solved the Korean separation the way it solved the German one, though the ideological rhetoric has changed. North Korean leadership invokes this history regularly to explain and justify its positions, and this has to be taken seriously in any analysis of North Korea’s 21st century development.

Along with Imperialisms past and present, North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programs are offshoots of 20th century processes of proliferation, in which weapons technology passed from state to state, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. Perhaps more importantly, North Korea is drawing on the experience of disarmament over the last 25 years, a process that has not always gone well for states that surrender their nuclear weapons capacity.

All this is true, but perhaps more importantly, it appears to be the foundation of the North Korean understanding of how we got to this point, and what matters in this moment: regime survival in the face of multiple hostile controlling empires. We are historical beings, etc.

The basic argument isn’t probably going to be surprising to any of our regular readers, but I thought it put things in perspective well enough. There’s a subtle undercurrent towards the end of me disagreeing with Dr. Sheena Greitens, whose talk a month earlier focused on shorter-term considerations, but nobody seems to have picked up on it. (I’m somewhere in that audience too, but I can’t find me in the pictures).

You can watch me deliver the whole thing, all 72 minutes worth! I’m not doing a TED talk anytime soon, but it’s not a bad version of my lecture style: I work from outlines instead of writing things out, I like maps, and if I don’t have a clock that I can see, I don’t leave a lot of time for questions. Also, as my mother pointed out, I tend to talk to the map more than the audience (the audience was a little more sparse than when the governor’s wife came, so there weren’t a lot of faces to address directly). Mostly, when I watch myself lecture, I focus on what I could have said or should have added if only I’d had more time, but given that I wasn’t going to just rapid-fire read something, it’s OK.

If you just want to see the maps (and one Kim family chart), the slides are here. I’m available for children’s parties, corporate events, or community festivals…

Japan/Journalism & Mass Media/Sino-Japanese Wars/visual culture/War

Art and War in Modern Japan

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

If you teach Modern Japan you are probably used to having lots of cool pictures to show your students. You probably pinch a lot of them from the MIT Visualizing Cultures site. A new book that you should be aware of is.

Hu, Philip, Rhiannon Paget, Sebastian Dobson, Maki Kaneko, and Andreas Marks. Conflicts of Interest: Art and War in Modern Japan. Saint Louis: University of Washington Press, 2016.

This is based on the impressive collection of Japanese war-related prints, board games, clothing etc at the St. Louis Museum of Art. There was apparently an exhibition, but I missed it at the time. They have nice pictures of images you have probably seen before, but also lots of stuff I have not seen before.

Rowdy Satsuma women disturbing the peace in 1877. (All of these have great descriptions to explain the context.)

The Battle of the Yalu, looking a bit less glorious than it does in many prints

Taiwanese rebels

The girl he left behind (from the cover of a novel)

 Fukuchi Gen’ichiro as a war corespondent
In addition to prints they also have other forms of patriotic propaganda. You may tell your students about the cult of the three human bombs, who bravely sacrificed their lives for Japan, but do you have a Kirin beer three human bombs ad to show them?

There are also some good essays on how war fits into modern Japanese visual culture.

There is a lot more in there. This book makes a great gift for the Japan person in your life. I assume you can get it from the museum shop, but is is also available on a well-known South American website.

Anecdotes/Contemporary/Current Events/Current/Recent Events

Internet Culture and Rough Music

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Not really a post, but more of an idea. I ran across this, about victims of the alleged Las Vegas  shooting who are being harassed on-line. I say alleged, because apparently there a lot of Second Amendment Enthusiasts who are convinced that the mass killing is a government or liberal or Illuminati conspiracy that will, of course, lead to grabbing our guns.

O.K., so nutjobs are sending you nasty e-mails and abusing you on Facebook. What is a spam filter for anyway? Toughen up buttercup! On the other hand, most of us now have an electronic life that is just as real as our meat-space life. College faculty often tell our students not to put their social life on the internet, since it may come back to bite you later, but that is advice from the Middle Ages or the 1980’s or something. If your social life is not on twitter then you have no social life.

Rough Music, under several names, was the “carnivalesque rituals of mockery through which communities displayed disapproval of moral and social infractions.” In olden times community meant people you might physically meet, or, if you were important enough, people who might abuse you in print. Now it is everyone. There is now a universal community that can abuse you, although you have no idea what your connection with them is or what may annoy them. It makes me think of Chinese people studying the 1971 People’s Daily to try and figure out what might be about to come down on them.

One thing I take away from this is that we (meaning the legacy media and the people who act like it) should take internet harassment more seriously. I don’t go with those who claim that speech is literally violence, but it can be an act of serious social exclusion, and if you are the target (or the shooter) it always hard to know where the dividing line between symbolic and physical violence will be drawn.

Historians have worked on how technological change has created new communities. They have worked on it a lot. Ideally, someone should write a book on how all the Early Modern Europe stuff on grub street publishers and a new print public and the Asian world of electronic communities, from the search engine of flesh (人肉搜索) and all the forms of on-line shaming that go on in Japan are informed by each other. I am busy today, however, so if you have written this book, or ideas for it, please post it in comments.

 

Rough Music and Charivari: Letters Between Natalie Zemon Davis and Edward Thompson, 1970–1972

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/26/las-vegas-shooting-conspiracy-theories-social-media?CMP=share_btn_fb

Korean

North Korea in the News-Trump is a dotard

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 2 Comments

As some of you may know, Kim Jong-un has referred to Donald Trump as a “dotard“, and this has caused a good deal of comment. Does this mean that Kim has “cracked open what apparently was a 1922 edition of the OED and called the president a “dotard.”” ? Maybe, or maybe not. The western press loves to make fun of Asian governments using badly translated idioms from their own languages or messing up western idioms. Those wacky, primitive Asians!

At least some people in the West knew exactly what Kim’s speech writers meant when they put this word in. It appears in the Lord of the Rings, and some of us looked it up when we first read it. ‘Folly.?’ said Gandalf. Nay, my lord, when you are a dotard you will die. [speaking to Denethor] When I first saw the quote from Kim I sort of assumed everyone knew the word. Honestly, it is in LOTR, that is not exactly obscure to some people.

So what does this tell us? Is the North Korean propaganda apparatus filled with Tolkien fans? Or is their understanding of modern idioms based on an idiosyncratic selection of foreign texts? I would guess that it is the latter, but the former would be cooler and more optimistic.

Maybe Kim himself is a Tolkien fan. The Kims are notorious movie buffs, and while I assume there was a Korean translation of LOTR even before the movies came out, even if there was no translation before, Kim could have ordered one. I could see how the metaphor of a hermetically sealed kingdom ruled by and overlord opposed by all others could be applied to N. Korea, although maybe Kim does not see himself as Sauron. Or maybe he does. (I wrote that as a joke, but now that I think about it, it may explain things.)

 

Posts

On “Buddhist Atrocities”

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 2 Comments

One of the odd substrains of commentary on the ongoing Rohingya genocide in Myanmar is Americans (mostly, as near as I can tell) shocked that a Buddhist society is capable of the kinds of cruelty we associate with Western imperialism and 20th century totalitarianism.

As I said on twitter:

People saying that Rohingya genocide proves that “Buddhist atrocities” can happen apparently ignored Sri Lankan civil war, Imperial Japan.
The hell of it is, Buddhism is as much a ‘religion of peace’ as Islam,Christianity. Same basic lessons, most adherents perfectly nice people
Like Islam, Christianity (I’m just covering major world religions here), Buddhism intersects with systems of power that implement violence.
Like Islam & Christianity, Buddhist institutions have, historically, validated state violence when it was in their institutional interest.
Buddhism’s reputation in the West benefits greatly from being not associated with any particular 20th century power (unless you’re paying
close attention to states like Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand and their treatment of non-Buddhist populations) and being strongly associated
with countercultural, anti-imperialistic movements (centered in 60s, but not exclusively) including association with Gandhian nonviolence.
(Gandhi was Hindu, not Buddhist, but *ahimsa* is common value among Jain, Buddhist, some Hindu traditions. Plus, sloppy Western orientalism)

I doubt any readers of this blog need me to fill in the historical details.

Mastodon