Frog in a Well

China/Classics/Education/English/General

Such are the guidelines for students

Posted on December 7, 2006 by Alan Baumler / 3 Comments

For the end of the semester, Guanzi on Duties of the Student from the Rickett translation

The teacher presents his teachings; students take them as standards for their behavior.
By being docile and reverential and keeping their minds completely open, their learning is maximized
On seeing goodness, they follow it; on hearing of righteousness, they submit to it.
Docile and compliant, filial and respectful toward their elders, they never display arrogance nor resort to physical force
Never false nor depraved in purpose, their conduct is certain to be correct and straightforward.
Observing constant standards whether abroad or at home, they are certain to seek out those who are virtuous.
Their features being well composed, their inner thoughts are certain to be exemplary in their correctness.
Though they awaken early and go to bed late, their dress is certain to be tidy
Mornings being devoted to enhancing their learning and evenings to practicing what they have learned, they are ever cautious of doing anything wrong
Being ever diligent in concentrating on these things—such are the standards for study

Nothing terribly new here. Students are docile and reverential, their minds are open, their appearance is neat and tidy. A standard
picture of the start of the semester be it today or during the Warring States. The text gets more interesting as it goes into the rituals of learning, especially the rituals of how students serve their teachers.

At mealtimes, when the teacher is about to eat, a student prepares food for him.
Having pulled up his sleeves, washed his hands, and rinsed his mouth, the server then kneels down to present the food.
When the sauces, grain, and various dishes are set forth, it must be
done in an orderly fashion.
Vegetable stews are served before dishes of fowl, meat, fish, or turtle. Both the stews and sliced meat dishes are placed in the middle but kept separate.
Meat dishes having been placed in front of the sauces, the entire setting forms a square. The grain is served last; on the left is the wine, on the right is water.
Having reported that everything is ready, the student withdraws and, cupping his hands before him in obeisance, stands to one side.
[The normal meal consists of] three servings of grain to which soup is added twice,
The student holds in his left hand a pottery serving dish, in his right chopsticks or a ladle.
He refills the various dishes in order as soon as he sees they are becoming empty. If two dishes become empty at the same time, he refills them in the order they were originally served.
Having refilled all the dishes, he begins the cycle again.
Since his serving implement has a foot-long handle, he does not need to kneel—such are the guidelines for making refills.

This tradition has basically died out, students no longer serve meals to their teachers. The whole text reflects a very different level of intimacy between students and teachers than we have today, and a different purpose to education, which was in this context more about moral training than about filling their heads with knowledge and skills.

More interesting to me is the ritual presentation of the food, which is matched by equally detailed descriptions of how to sweep a floor. I’m sure if the teacher had been in the mood he could have explained the ritual importance of serving food in the proper order, and how a proper ritual creates the proper relationship between teacher and student. Of course many students would not have grasped this at first, and would have been forced through the ritual over and over again without understanding it. Most teachers would probably regard that as o.k. Just going through the ritual does you good. The modern historian’s comparison is probably footnotes. A thing full of meaning for us, but no matter how often we explain it they tend to see it as a pointless bit of ritual. Of course it can sometimes seem a pointless bit of ritual to the teacher as well, (who has not though their students were going through the motions) but still they are convinced that ritual practice will have some effect.

When the teacher is about to retire, the students all stand. They respectfully present him with his pillow and mat and ask him where he would like to place his feet. The first time they arrange his sleeping mat, they request this information, but once the pattern has been established, they do not.

Another dead ritual, as students no longer tuck their teachers into bed. Although a fair number of students think, like the author of this text, that teachers do not exist outside of the context of teaching. I am always amazed by the number of students who seem to think I lie motionless in a coffin through the break until students appear again and I re-animate. Actually, I have a life of my own and spend most of the break acting like a normal human.

After the teacher has retired, each student seeks out his friends,
Dissecting and polishing,
Each one strengthens his arguments.
The day’s routine having been completed, the next day it begins
anew. Such are the guidelines for students.

And so the semester ends, and students go off to contemplate and perfect what they have learned.

Current/Recent Events/English/General/Historiography/Japan/US-Japan/War/幕末/昭和

Pearl Harbor and the longue duree

Posted on December 4, 2006 by Jonathan Dresner / 8 Comments

In honor of the 65th anniversary, HNN has a Pearl Harbor extravaganza this week. There’s a little recap, and the obligatory zombie error smackdown, which are fine. The article by George Feifer, though, is considerably more challenging: he argues that Pearl Harbor is a direct result of Perry’s opening of Japan.

Think about that one a minute. The argument, roughly, goes like this: by forcing Japan to recognize its technological and cultural inferiority, by humiliating the nation, the US put Japan on a path of competitive militarization and power expansion directed at mirroring and surpassing specifically US power, which ultimately resulted in the clash of empires which never coincides with anything convenient in the academic calendar. He even argues, echoing Ishiwara Kanji, that the US shouldn’t have been surprised, given how the US-Japan relationship begins, by the result.

I don’t find that argument any more convincing than the ones which argue a straight line between Pearl Harbor and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are some interesting assertions — not much in the way of evidence, but it’s a short piece — about the military commanders involved, Ishiwara Kanji and Yamamoto Isoroku, but it’s a long way from poetic justice to historical causality. You can’t draw straight lines across broad fields of contingencies. To fixate on the US-Japan relationship, to the exclusion of Japan’s other unsatisfactory international relationships, to fixate on Perry as the cause to the exclusion of basic facts of geography in an age of geo-politics, to distill a complex of policy and principle down to a simplistic vengeance “served cold”, may make for a satisfying narrative, but doesn’t — it seems to me — adhere to any of the principles of good historical logic which we’re supposed to model for our students and leaders.

Feifer is actually doing more than just arguing a long causal chain; he’s also drawing parallels between the opening of Japan and the US intervention in Iraq: misleading public statements about goals (“The shipwrecked-sailors issue was the weapons-of-mass-destruction boondoggle of its day”), cultural supremacism, imperialistic zeal (he compares Commodore Perry with Vice President Cheney, which really puts the “conservative” back in “neo-con”) and the role of coal as the oil of the 19th century. You could find those four elements — really only three: supremacism, imperialism and resource security — in lots of 19th and 20th century interventions. He ends with the portentous lines: “The galled people with the punctured conviction of their own superiority took special pleasure in the sinking of four ships on Battleship Row: the number with which Perry first menaced them. Shouldn’t that prompt thought about the unintended consequences of using force?” The implication here is that even if our adventurism in Iraq turns out well inthe short or medium term, it’s likely to come back to bite us eventually. While I’m sympathetic to this argument in some forms (and I know how hard it is to find a good closing line, too), its overreaching: ultimately there are no uses of force which don’t have possible unintended consequences.

If the Americans hadn’t gotten Japan to sign treaties, others would have — Russians, British — and it would have been no less humiliating. If the Americans hadn’t colonized the Pacific, the Spanish and Dutch and British would still have been there. If the Russians hadn’t been agressive in northeast Asia… well, they wouldn’t have been Russians, and then we’re talking way-out counterfactuals. Japan had a lot of reason to feel threatened, a lot of nations looking down at them, and its success made conflict over resources and territory very likely. Single lines don’t connect all these dots.

Academia/Education/Japan/Teaching

The Trials and Tribulations of Teaching

Posted on December 3, 2006 by Morgan Pitelka / 11 Comments

A friend who teaches American and sometimes Asian history courses sent me the following enquiry, which she received via email from one of her American history students. I am happy to say that I have never received a student message this inane or inarticulate, though the fundamental confusion about the geography of the world and the chronology of our recent past is somewhat familiar.

Now, I have a question pertaining to the history of World War 2. I was wondering why we dropped the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. because we didnt do it until 1945 and Pearl Harbor was in 1941. Also, we had already gotten back at them on April 18, 1942 in Tokyo right? First it was Hiroshima on August 6th and then three days later we dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki in 1945, correect? My other question is if Japan is a seperate country from North Korea and I know its seperate from China, but do they speak Chinese. Last night I was watching Pearl Harbor and in it they said to remember these words, I can’t say them, but they were in Chinese. I thought it was the Japanese we were mad at in Tokyo. I am a little confused about this please help.Thanks, XXXXXXXXXX

Of course the general ignorance of this message is frustrating, but what really bothers me is the lack of formality. I have talked with colleagues about this, and many disagree. Email is the students’ natural medium, they say, and they are not used to writing in the style of a letter as I would prefer: “Dear Professor So-and-So.” Still, it rankles me when I get emails from students that begin, “Hey, I was wondering . . .” Related to the lack of formality is the absence of care regarding spelling and grammatical errors. We all send emails (or publish blog entries) without spell-checking, but the above message is just egregious.

Correect?

Art/Education/English/General/Japan/Teaching/Web Sites/明治/江戸

Thanksgiving Vacation and Homework

Posted on December 3, 2006 by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

Over Thanksgiving weekend, my family and I went over to the Waikoloa Hilton. My son loves the boats and trams, and there’s nothing like watching dolphins play. The pools are great and the food, though pricey, is good.

But the fun part, for me, is their immense collection of Asian and Pacific art. Most of it is arranged along a mile-long “Museum Walkway,” and one evening after my son was asleep, I went out and walked the mile with my digital camera. Conditions were not ideal: a lot of the collection is under glass, and the hallway is narrow enough that larger pieces were sometimes hard to fit in the viewfield; as a result there’s a lot more pictures at an angle than I’d like. I went back the next day to see if I could get better non-flash shots, but the oddities of light and shadow on glass actually made it harder to get most things. Short of convincing the hotel to let me shoot a catalog for them, this is the best I’m gonna get.

I was pondering how best to archive and share these pictures, and I finally decided to set up a Flickr account (I had to upgrade, since I’ve got about a gigabyte’s worth of material and that would take about 50 months to upload on the free account). I haven’t gone through the whole collection yet, but you can see a nice sample of about a dozen pictures here. The collection ranges from South Pacific to Asia, with a bunch of Western stuff thrown in for good measure; eventually my goal is to have the whole collection uploaded and sorted into sets. If anyone sees something here that they want more of, let me know and I can start there….

Also, in the category of sharing great collections of images, if you aren’t on H-Asia you might not have seen this: “The Section of Japanese Studies of the Department of East Asian Studies of the University of Vienna is pleased to announce the opening of the internet database: UKIYO’E CARICATURES 1842-1905” There’s a lot more than just caricatures, and the images aren’t very heavily annotated (though they did transcribe the texts, which is a nice touch), but it’s worth noting.

Update: I’ve been rooting around Flickr — well, OK, I just plugged “Japan” into their group search box — and came up with a whole bunch of Japan-related collections: Japanese Archaeology, Japanese 20th Century, Buddhism in Japan, the very mixed Japan-Hawai’i Connection, and the deliberately mixed Japan: Old and New. Timesink!

General/Japan/Occupation/photography/US-Japan

Photos of Japan, 1951

Posted on December 1, 2006 by Morgan Pitelka / 13 Comments

One of my former students and her boyfriend have been scanning in old photos, and they happened upon some gems taken by the young man’s grandfather when he was stationed in Japan during the Korean War. I think these are some wonderful pictures, and I offer my thanks to Margaret and James for sharing them, and to James’s grandfather for taking them.

This image, which was hand labeled with the caption “Beggars chased by M.P.s!” seems to show a bunch of people crossing train tracks at a station of some sort. Notice the guy lounging on the parked flatbed in the middle-left of the picture. The photographer really captured the movement of the people across the tracks, though I certainly don’t see any beggars or M.P.s! The caption seems important, though. Can we assume that Japanese people running across train tracks in 1951 pretty much must have been up to something in the imagined visual world of Occupation-era photography?

This image was labeled “Hiroshima R.R. Station 1951” and is filled with all the contrasting forces of the age. Look at the different poses and sartorial styles of the two soldiers, who seem to represent two poles of the American military. Also interesting is the Japanese text visible in the photo, such as the writing on the bus, “Hiroshima Suburban Bus Company,” which in the prewar style reads from right to left; and the sign on the shop to the right of the station, which reads in the traditional style from top to bottom and right to left, “Hiroshima Noted Product (meisan) Raw Oysters.” Yum! The two people who seem to be most interested in the photographer are the little girl on the bus with the red hat and the man who is wearing a suit and walking toward the camera while reaching into his inner pocket. The fact that this is Hiroshima, too, post-atomic bomb and pre-bullet train, lends the photo extra meaning. I see a doubling here: American technology (the camera in the hands of the G.I.) constructing a representation of a city that was destroyed by American technology.

This photo, labeled “Altar Girls, Shinto Grand Shrine of Eise, 1951,” which I assume should be “Ise,” is a nicely shot picture that prefigures a lot of later explicitly exotic imagery of traditional Japan. I’m kind of surprised that a picture that looks so much like tourist and government imagery from the 80s and 90s would have been taken so early. I guess I should have known that G.I.s on furlough from Korea would make the grand pilgrimage like everyone else? It is a very masculine framing of the subject. This makes me wonder when the scopic regime of photography of traditional subjects was established in Japan. It also makes me wonder who the intended viewers were for photos like these?

Lastly, this photo was labeled, in the parlance of the time, “Jap Pearl Diver (Fresh out of the water) 1951,” and positively glows with the unequal sexual politics of the Occupation era. The usual binaries seem to be present here: the male, conquering West; the female, passive East; and the dry, clean professional man and the wet, sexually alluring woman.

These types of visual materials must be fairly common among the old slide collections of veterans, but I would guess that few have been collected together or made public. They seem to me like invaluable records of this fascinating historical moment. Perhaps I should clarify what I mean by that. The gaze of the G.I. photographers is particularly clearly recorded here, making these images not so much records of Japan in 1951 as artifacts of the creation of certain American identities against a newly constituted “Japan.”

China/English/文庫

Source: The China Provincial Atlas and Geography

Posted on December 1, 2006 by K. M. Lawson / 5 Comments

This posting is the first of what I hope will become a more frequent kind of offering here at Frog in a Well. I’m not sure how it will go yet but I hope that we can gradually expand Frog in a Well to incorporate a few new projects. The first new project I wish to announce is the Frog in a Well Library or the 文庫. Here we will post raw sources and scanned materials of interest to those who study the history of East Asia.

井底之蛙的文庫 – The Frog in a Well Library

The first addition to the library is a scanned copy of a 1935 book on the provincial geography of China put out by the North-China Daily News. It will be interesting to anyone who wants to see descriptions of each province, the shape and names of locations (in English), descriptions of the “character” of the “racial types” of each province, short descriptions of major cities, details of roads and railways as of ’35, industry, and even how many protestant/catholic missions there are. There is a separate section for 滿州國 and the foreign settlements in Shanghai, as well as a few interesting paragraphs on the “peculiar” status of Tibet (interesting to note that there is nothing on the “peculiar” status of Manchuria, or of Mongolia at the time) and after discussing Soviet influence concludes that Xinjiang “faces West rather than East.”

Library Download Page: The China Provincial Atlas and Geography

English/General/Japan/Teaching

Love and Inspiration

Posted on November 30, 2006 by Jonathan Dresner / 2 Comments

My aunt, Alice Schlossberg, passed away on Sunday. She was the first Asianist and history teacher in my family, and I will miss her terribly. Perhaps my first real taste of Asian culture — as opposed to Chinese food — was finding Zen Comics in her book collection as a kid.

She was the kind of teacher I never had in high school: rigorous, energetic, smart, inspiring and effective. (I had some of those, but never in one package). Being part of a medium-sized school, she taught US — she was a proud member of the Millard Fillmore Society, she told me — and European history — she had her students simulate the Versailles conference — as well as Asian.

The last few years, Alice had been spending summers getting familiar with new technologies and new scholarship, building web sites with primary and secondary materials for student research projects. She told me about some of the tricks and techniques she used to draw students in, like having them write their responses and interpretations to five minutes of a documentary about the Ganges with the sound off, so there was no voice-over telling them what to think.

Much of what I remember and loved about her has nothing to do with her work — the chocolate chip corn muffins, the penguin collection (her brother — my father — also began collecting penguins as an adult, independently), the incredibly irreverent humor (puns and all) and strong sense of justice, the holidays. The Schlossbergs live in Beverly, just north of Boston, so I got to know the MBTA commuter trains pretty well. They were always welcoming and supportive, and every graduate student should have an aunt and her family in the vicinity, I think.

We will miss her, and I hope that I can continue to grow as a teacher until I feel like I’ve lived up to her example.

China/General/Intellectual/Maoist era (1949-1976)/Republican

Chairman Mao’s teacher

Posted on November 29, 2006 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

A nice article in Modern China on Mao’s teacher Yang Changji. The article draws on Yeh Wen-Hsin’s work on the provincial background of many of the second group of Communist leaders. The early years of the party were dominated by “an urban radicalism; in contrast, the later, revolutionary communism was an outgrowth of conservative, Confucian-bound rural China.” Liu demonstrates this by looking at the ideas and activities of Yang Changji, who might have been just another provincial schoolteacher had one of his students not been Chairman Mao.

The article is not too Mao-centered and Liu provides a nice picture of a provincial intellectual. Two things struck me. One is the description of Yang as an intellectual celebrity

within two months everyone who attended Mr. Yang’s lectures admired and respected him. Although he did not talk much in class, each short statement meant a great deal. Within a year, the entire school accepted him and he became the “Confucius of First Normal.” Other schools in Changsha invited him and he conducted classes [in schools] as far [away] as the high school at the foot of Yuelu Mountain. Soon he was known to the students throughout the city as “Confucius”

The perfect modern version of the Confucian pendant, complete with gnomic lectures and a personal following. In the old days students would have come from distant places to hear him rather than him having to trek out into the boonies to talk to them. Yang taught a lot of foreign stuff (he studied in Japan) but he always claimed that a New China had to be built on native foundations. Liu gives the following quote as an example of Yang’s interest in western-style individualism

In the physical world, the center is my body; in the spiritual/mental realm, the center is my mind. In short, among the ten thousand things in the universe, I am the essence. The emperor is my emperor; the father is my father; the teacher is my teacher; the wealth is my wealth; heaven and earth are my heaven and earth…Mencius said: “All things in the world are complete in me”…Everything in the universe is also my responsibility.

This is not, to my mind, individualism, in a western sense. Wikipedia is not very strong here but it lists a lot of the Western thinkers who have used the term. Yang seems to be revamping the old Confucian cosmology by putting himself at the center of it rather than a (usually hypothetical) sage king. Obviously this fits in well with Mao’s later ideas about himself and his role.

Liu Liyan “The Man Who Molded Mao: Yang Changji and the First Generation of Chinese Communists”Modern China32.4 October 2006

English/Food/Japan

Someone’s class project….

Posted on November 17, 2006 by Jonathan Dresner / 3 Comments

Apparently, some English class at a Japanese university is exploring the Anglophone Blogosphere in search of pen pals and practice. (This is the closest thing to a meme you’re probably ever going to get on this blog.) This was mine:
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China/Ethnic Minorities/General/Identity/Ming

Keeping Halal in the Ming dynasty

Posted on November 12, 2006 by Alan Baumler / 8 Comments

As regular readers know, I am interested in the question of how people are defined as Chinese. One nice bit of data comes from Hans Kuhner. He is looking at a pair of families in the early Ming and trying to figure out what, for them, is Chinese behavior. Although today the Yuan-Ming transition is sometimes presented as an uprising of native Chinese against their Mongol rulers and a restoration of Han rule, in fact the ethnic transition was a lot more complex, as shown in the case of two families.

One of the families is the Ding lineage of Quanzhou, once a major port for international trade. The Dings won their first jinshi degree in 1501. In their genealogies the first ancestor is Jiezhai, and all the early ancestors have Chinese names and are presented as wholly Chinese. It is only much later that it comes out that the first ancestor was also called Sayyid Ajall, a Bokharan who served as a governor under the Yuan. Sayyid stayed on in China after the fall of the Yuan, changing his name and attempting to deflect the considerable hostility towards semu people in the early Ming. This hostility was entirely popular. The state did not order purges of non-Chinese and in fact went to some length to avoid ethnic trouble. The Dings, however, got in a good deal of trouble over the years, as political opponents accused them of false registration, largely, it seems as a way of getting even with the Dings, not because people were so concerned with ethnicity. A later descendent, Ding Yanxia, described the family’s background this way.

We cannot know in detail where our family (jia) has come from before the time of Jiezhai. As far as religion (jiao) is concerned, in former times they seem to have followed customs that were not yet civilized. For example, they did not change the clothes [of the dead person] before it was put into the coffin, and they did not use wood for the coffin. The burial took place already on the third day after death, and [the corpse] was only covered with a very thin layer. The mourning attire was made of cotton, and when praying, there were no soul tablets for the ancestors, and no sacrificial offerings. On meetings, people bowed to the west at the time of sunset. Every first month [of the year] there was a period of fasting and one was allowed to eat only after sunset, while during the day, people were hungry. God (shen) was revered only with aromatic herbs, there were no sacrifices of wine and fruit and no paper money [as sacrifice] was burned. When reciting the holy book (qing jing) one imitated the traditional sound of the barbarian (yi) language, without understanding its meaning and not even trying to understand it. This was done on both happy and unhappy occasions. It was only allowed to eat meat that was slaughtered at home, and pork was forbidden. One regularly had to take a bath, and without bathing one was nor allowed to attend worship. As for clothing, cotton was preferred to silk, and on all occasions, cleanliness was desirable. When I was young, I still could see these customs personally. … Today, we burn paper money in the sacrifices for the ancestors, cattle has not to be slaughtered at home, all wear hemp as mourning attire, no more cotton. Sometimes, people wait as long as ten years before the burial. On both happy and unhappy occasions, Daoist and Buddhist monks are invited. Pork is eaten, and there is increasing conformity with [Chinese] ritual. However, there still are some who are proud of not following the [Chinese] ritual. With regard to the desirability of cleanliness, I have seen no reduction. Alas, as far as the teachings of the Noble Man on ritual are concerned, some maintain that it should be based on the traditions of one’s country and should be adhered to without the slightest change, Others maintain that some [aspects of] ritual can be different while others should be adhered to, with their practicality as criterion. What does “practicality” mean? It should conform to the principle of heaven and to human emotions. If they do not harm these two, why should we change them just in order to conform to the views of society?

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China/Gender/General/Web Sites and Resources

Cinderella, dressed in yellow, went to Scotland and kissed a fellow

Posted on November 7, 2006 by Alan Baumler / 5 Comments

Via Cliopatria, a website with Scottish broadsides from 1810-1830. One is obviously satirical, announcing the arrival of a Chinese doctor Dr. Puff Stuff Sham Quirko Ye – Trick. The good doctor’s skill was admired by all the crowned heads of Asia, and he brings to Scotland his miraculous cures. He can grow new teeth, no doubt a popular claim given the state of English dentistry (back then). He can restore lost eyes and limbs. His skills kept the Chinese empress bearing children into her 80^th year. He can cure cancer using something that sounds like moxabustion. Most interestingly, to me

He has also brought over the method of bandaging, by which the Chinese ladies confine their feet to that beautiful-smallness, has to be soarcely equal to the size of the great toe-nail of an English woman.

I know that the cult of small feet also existed in Europe, but is interesting to see footbinding presented in a fairly positive sort of way as late as 1830. Dorothy Ko sees the later critique of footbinding as inspired in part by a Western criticism and a new transnational context. I’m reluctant to draw a line where the joke ends and the serious begins in this text, but it seems that footbinding is still admirable here.

China-Japan/English/Film/Korea-Japan/Memory/Occupation/War/昭和

Empire in Sonny Chiba’s Shōrinji Kempō

Posted on November 5, 2006 by K. M. Lawson / 1 Comment

I just watched an old 1975 movie with Sonny Chiba in it called Shōrinji Kempō 少林寺拳法 (the English title, inexplicably is “The Killing Machine”) which is a sensationalized action movie version of the life of Sō Dōshin, the founder of the martial art and religious group Shōrinji Kempō.

I think that this obscure movie must have made it onto my Netflix list last year when I was roommates with fellow Frog contributor Craig and shared a Netflix subscription with him. Craig studies Karate and modernity and is the author of one of the most commented postings here at Frog in a Well.

Watching bad movies can actually be quite educational. This movie interested me for two reasons: 1) it is a mid-70s movie portraying Japan in the immediate aftermath of war and 2) there are a number of references to war, empire, and minorities such as Koreans in Japan which I found interesting. Allow me to share some of these points.

The first two scenes of the movie take place in mainland China, during the war. Sō Dōshin, played by Sonny Chiba, is spying on some Chinese soldiers who are planning a dastardly ambush of Japanese troops. The Chinese commander, who must have been played by a Japanese actor, spoke in such horrible Chinese I doubt any Chinese viewer of the movie could have made out anything he said, except perhaps the completely flat-toned “Neee shooo reeeebenren ma” [Are you Japanese?] he says, discovering the presence of the spy in the audience of his tactical planning meeting. Sō kills everyone with a grabbed machine gun and flees back to the Japanese lines.

Sō informs his commanding officer that their troops must take a detour only to be met with his weeping fellow soldiers’ announcement that Japan has surrendered. This so traumatizes Sō that he proceeds to machine gun everything around him, with fellow Japanese soldiers diving for cover. He concludes in the narration, “The Japanese Empire may have been defeated but I am not defeated.” He returns to Japan to run a gang of street urchins and cook porridge in his occupied home country.

Sō’s next battle is on a train in Japan during his return. Korean gangsters, dressed in black leather jackets and sunglasses have kicked some poor train passengers out of their seats. They cry, “Your nation is defeated!” Sō, dressed in Chinese looking garb, soon sends them sprawling. As he helps them to their feet he tells the now humbled Koreans:

日本に住む気なら仲良くしようじゃないか

“If you want to live in Japan, let’s all get along, eh?”

A few scenes later he rescues a woman who is being beaten up by prostitutes in a slum for working on their turf. In thanks for being saved and being given a free meal she offers herself to Sō on a pile of rubble. He rejects her and chides her for giving up her purity and turning to prostitution. She explains that her body has already been ravaged countless times by Russian soldiers in Manchuria so she has nothing left to lose. He assures her that she is still the person she always was and that,

いやなことも忘れるよ

“You can forget the horrible things, too.”

Here something interesting happens. Though the focus of the scene is the tragic story of a Japanese women raped by Russian soldiers and the horrible poverty of the early postwar period, the director makes a move that immediately connects the fortunes of this one Japanese woman, to that of the Japanese nation as a whole. Just as Sō says, “You can forget the horrible things, too,” the camera slowly moves from the image of the face of the crying woman to the image of a tattered Japanese flag laying in a muddy puddle behind her.

Sō soon finds himself fighting the gangs in the black market and beating up and crippling two American occupation soldiers who run over one of his boys in the market (the little brother of the woman above). He is arrested but a kind police officer lets him escape. When talking to the police officer Sō admits he is a trouble maker but adds a line flashing back to his days in China. Now instead of spying on the Chinese we learn that he was their noble defender:

虐げられた中国の民衆をみるとついカッとなって、よく軍ともめたもんです。

“When I saw the abused people of China I would lose my temper and often got into trouble with the military.”

It is after his escape from prison custody that he goes to Tadotsu in Shikoku where he founds Shōrinji Kempō. There is footage of the complex (as of 1975) in the beginning of the movie and it appears the movie was made with some cooperation from the organization. I think I recognized some of the buildings from a visit I made to their complex when I wandered around Tadotsu for a day on a trip Shikoku a few years ago. Here in Tadotsu the movie switches to a more classic gangster match up with Sō and his boys representing the virtuous “defenders of the people” versus the evil gangsters allied with the corrupt police and occupation authorities. There is also a single anti-Communist comment by one of Sō’s people but I can’t find the scene again as I am writing this.

In a scene reminiscent of the Edo period sword school challenges two Judō fighters come in and disrupt one of the increasingly attended training sessions to challenge Sō to a fight. Among their threats we find these lines:

少林というのは藤八拳の親戚かね。戦争に負けたからといって支那の武術までありがたがるごとなか。

“Shōrin, that is something like Tōhachiken isn’t it? Just because we lost the war, doesn’t mean we have look up to China’s martial arts. [Kyūshū dialect]”

Sō soon humbles these two representatives of the more traditional Japanese martial art and they flee the premises.

There is one more mention of Koreans in the movie. One of Sō’s friends and former prison companions is looking for his wife, who believes that he died in Burma during the war. He finds her alive and remarried to a Korean in Takamatsu. Before meeting her, he meets his son, who he has never met before and doesn’t know. The character asks the boy why he isn’t playing baseball with the other children, and he says he has no glove. Besides, he says,

朝鮮人の子はバットとボールももってなきゃだめたって

“They said Korean children can’t join in unless they have a bat and a ball, too.”

Sō’s friend then meets his long lost wife and learns that she has married a Korean after the war. In an interesting statement which at once reveals the stereotype of Koreans as unscrupulous types, but vindicates the husband on a personal level, she describes the difficulty with her new marriage:

朝鮮人らしいな．．．

．．．曲がったことが嫌いで貧乏しています。

“Old Husband: So I understand your husband is Korean?
Wife: …He hates crooked ways so we are living in poverty.”

The movie ends after a boring series of battles with local gangsters. The closing scenes presents us with a sweeping shot, found in many of these martial arts movies, of hundreds of Shōrinji Kempō practitioners practicing outdoors. We are told that, “Strength [used] without Justice is [simply] Violence, Justice without Strength is Powerless.”

I have requested the only book by Sō Dōshin I found in our library here from our depository, which is a 1970s Korean translation of one of his philosophical guides to Shōrinji Kempō. I’m curious if the martial art ever caught on in Korea or in its alleged original home of China.

I’m deeply skeptical, as I think we always should be, of most everything you can find online about the real Sō’s childhood life in Manchuria in either Japanese or English. It would be interested to know, however, if he indeed ended up spending some of his childhood, after his grandfather died, with one of the founders of the Amur River society (aka Black Dragon Society) and if, as some sites claim, he was just a military cartographer during the Sino-Japanese war or he was in fact active in military intelligence (the two are by no means contradictory). It would also be interesting know how Henan’s Shaolin temple passed the wartime occupation period (seems as though much of it was burnt to the ground by a warlord in the 20s) and the extent of connections between some of the societies associated with these martial arts and the Japanese occupying troops and officers. Most of what I found on Sō online was found on websites of Shōrinji Kempō practitioners.

There are two interesting discursive levels at work here though. One is the portrayal of China, Chinese, and Koreans in occupation Japan in the 1970s movie. The second is the importance of Empire and the Wartime experience in the origin stories and narratives of some of the most popular martial arts (Kyokushin karate, Aikido, and Shōrinji Kempō being the best examples I think).

General/Korea

Monthly Miscellany

Posted on November 4, 2006 by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

The carnivals roll on: Nathanael Robinson hosted the last AHC, and did a very nice job. The next edition will be hosted by our very own Owen Miller in a week or so: get your nominations in soon! And we’re looking for more AHC hosts: we’ve got open spots from December on.

After a return engagement by founding host John McKay, the Carnival of Bad History is moving to England, where Natalie Bennett will be collecting historical turkeys for the pre-Thanksgiving edition.

As always, your best source for good history is the History Carnival, hosted this time at longtime contributor (especially to the Bad History carnival) Sergey Romanov. In two weeks, another edition: submit here. And the latest Early Modern edition of Carnivalesque features a tabloid cover and lots of great stuff. I believe they’re still looking for volunteers for hosts.

Almost forgot: The Cliopatria Award Nominations are open through November: Best Blogs (individual, group, new), Best Post (individual and series) and Best Writing. Pick your favorites and add ’em to the list!

And Now, the News…

Daniel Sneider has a wonderful op-ed detailing the ongoing tensions in the US-South Korean relationship, belying the ballyhooed “best friend” meme.

Finally, because this is a Frog website, I have to share one of my son’s favorite sites, National Aquarium’s Frog Chorus. It’s like the blogging soundtrack we never had….

China/General

Monthly Miscellany

Posted on November 4, 2006 by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

After a return engagement by founding host John McKay, the Carnival of Bad History is moving to England, where Natalie Bennett will be collecting historical turkeys for the pre-Thanksgiving edition.

And Now, the News…

Alun Salt has some nice thoughts and links on The Needham Question, one of the great driving forces of Sci/Tech history in Asia.

It’s not Chinese history, but Chinese historian Andrew Meyer has a strong argument in favor of US withdrawal from Iraq which deserves wider attention. I’m not entirely convinced, but it does point out the need for fundamental shifts in direction and method.

Bill quotes cyberpunk novelist Neal Stephenson on the tension between the Chinese state and new information technologies. This was written back in the early 90s, by the way….

Orville Schell’s review of Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals’ Mao’s Last Revolution is a detailed and very supportive piece. For a more literary take on the GPCR, there’s Da Chen’s new novel, which sounds very interesting, though I admit that I’ve never read any Da Chen before….

Jonathan Benda reports on a new movie about Taiwanese independence activists harassed by spies — Taiwanese spies, no less — in the US

HK Dave meditates on the last Communist regime to go nuclear.

Lots of new stuff up at the anti-Menzies site 1421 Exposed, including my personal favorite, Kirsten Seaver’s demolition of his North American East Coast colonies theories.[via]

The Great Wall’s been in the news a lot lately: attracting rowdy tourists, photographed by an English runner, and facing an official survey to determine its true scale.

Other Chinese archaeological discoveries include 4500 year old writing and Han-era tunnels under Imperial compounds.

Via wood s lot, guerrilla art in China and an exhibition of new Chinese video and photographic art

Friendship Store, a refuge for foreigners in Beijing since its founding just before the Cultural Revolution, is being upgraded, part of the ongoing Olympic facelift.

Harvard-Yenching Library, my old stomping grounds, has an online exhibition of photographs of Chinese Muslims from the 1920s and 1930s.

A new publication I really ought to pick up, given my research interests and family ties to the home of the World Series Winning Cardinals: Chinese St. Louis.

The richest person in China is recycling US scrap paper. There’s the global economy in a nutshell, eh?

Finally, because this is a Frog website, I have to share one of my son’s favorite sites, National Aquarium’s Frog Chorus. It’s like the blogging soundtrack we never had….

General/Japan

Monthly Miscellany

Posted on November 4, 2006 by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

After a return engagement by founding host John McKay, the Carnival of Bad History is moving to England, where Natalie Bennett will be collecting historical turkeys for the pre-Thanksgiving edition.

And Now, the News…

Charles Burress on Ehren Watada, discusses different Japanese American reactions to the case: the divisions are historical, rooted in the different experiences of Hawai’i-Japanese (high levels of volunteerism; minimal internment) and mainland Japanese-Americans (intense internment disruptions; significant resistance to draft). This could use some more clarification, but it’s a good start.

Fellow Frogger David McNeill tackles Clint Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers from the perspective of the Japanese side of the Iwo Jima experience. He also got interviewed about the recent birth of an Imperial Male, which sounds an awful lot like other Japanese news “interviews” I’ve heard about, at least with regard to the imperial institution.

The online Oliver Statler collection is up at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa library site. All kinds of miscellanous materials, from professional correspondence to research notes.

I knew about the traditional age-counting issue in Japan, but I didn’t know about the preganancy timing issue

Adamu has been working through the Japanese Diet’s web presence…. I’m not sure the US Congress could stand up to such scrutiny any better, but I’d love to see someone else do the work to find out.

Finally, because this is a Frog website, I have to share one of my son’s favorite sites, National Aquarium’s Frog Chorus. It’s like the blogging soundtrack we never had….