Blog Carnival/Current/Recent Events/General/Japan

AHC Call for Posts, plus

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 2 Comments

Roy Berman, the MutantFrog himself, will host the next Asian History Carnival at Mutant Frog Travelogue on the 18th. Get your nominations in to him directly (roy dot berman at gmail dot com), through blogcarnival.com or with del.icio.us tags. Remember, if you don’t submit anything, we may pick the worst thing you ever posted publicly….

A few other news notes:

Japan is the final resting place of … Jesus Christ? Maybe he was looking for the lost tribes of Israel…

Slightly Expurgated government documents, our own, in this case, because we don’t want to admit yet what we were doing in Japan in the sixties

Everyone’s got an opinion: Latest (and loudest?) contributors to the debate over Hiroshima? Methodists v. Episcopalians: Episcopalians apologize and theconservative Methodists use FrontPageMag to object.

Blogs and Carnivals/General/Historiography/Korea/Korea-China/US-Korea

AHC Call for Posts, plus

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 1 Comment

Roy Berman, the MutantFrog himself, will host the next Asian History Carnival at Mutant Frog Travelogue on the 18th. Get your nominations in to him directly (roy dot berman at gmail dot com), through blogcarnival.com or with del.icio.us tags. Remember, if you don’t submit anything, we may pick the worst thing you ever posted publicly….

A few other news notes:

Korean-American relations have always been tense says Daniel Sneider. This is an excellent brief survey of the last fifty years, a stark reminder that even our staunchest allies have minds of their own….

And in the “full employment for nationalist historians” category, Korea-China History Wars Continue, in anticipation of the collapse of North Korea. Or not, but they continue anyway.

Academia/Current/Recent Events/English/General/Japan/Memory/Nationalism

That 9.11 Incident

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 4 Comments

Of course I remember 9/11/01. You don’t forget the day when you think you’re watching a rerun of a terrible accident — how quickly they got footage, you marvel briefly — and realize that you’re actually watching an atrocity in progress. You don’t forget the day when a student’s cell phone gets a text message that a plane has crashed on the Mall in DC (one day when you don’t care about them text messaging in class, and you don’t forget the relief that it wasn’t true, either). You don’t forget the day when you watch people die on TV, while your 8-month-pregnant spouse checks insulin levels.

I really did try to have class that morning. It was my Modern Japan class, and I tried — oh, how I tried — to talk coherently about terrorism in Japanese history. Nothing wrong with current events, if you can relate it to the course material, right? I talked about the bakumatsu assassination campaigns, about the right-wing assasinations and coup attempts of the ’30s; I honestly don’t remember if I got the Great Treason Incident in there or not, what with text messages and sharing what little we knew, and all. I do remember running out of things to say and dismissing them early, and being grateful when the president of the college cancelled classes for the remainder of the day. I went back to my office, called the college chaplain to see what was going on with regard to our small but noticeable Muslim student population (Everyone was fine: Cedar Rapids has the oldest mosque west of the Mississippi river and the local Muslim community is quite well integrated and respected), and went home to my pregnant wife.

It was a shocking event, to be sure. But it wasn’t quite such a surprise. It wasn’t all that long after I’d read Tom Clancy’s excreable Debt of Honor a book whose only redeeming feature (I’ve read quite a bit of Clancy’s work, and I find it wildly inconsistent in quality, which is why there’s always hope about a new one) was the ending — yeah, I’m gonna give it away — in which a businessman/pilot steals a jetliner, talks his way into the DC air traffic patterns, and obliterates a Joint Session of Congress, Tokkotai-style. (If you want to know how the immortal Jack Ryan solves the problem, you have to read Executive Orders, which is considerably more exciting and interesting and plausible….) Obviously, anyone teaching Japanese history has had to wrestle a bit with the issue of suicide attacks — human bullets, shattered jewels, divine winds, etc. — and they had been increasingly common in the Middle East of late.

Being Jewish, I have that slightly-greater-than-average-American-interest in Middle Eastern affairs, and that slightly-greater-than-average-paranoia about violent, hostile forces. Not only wasn’t the 9/11 attack not the first large domestic terror attack, it wasn’t even the first large, Islamist, domestic terror attack on the World Trade Center. The Taliban had long since destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas (nothing like destruction of cultural property to get an historian’s attention), not to mention imposing strictures on Afghani women that would make Draco blanch. US interests had been attacked overseas, the bombing of the Jewish center in Argentina proved the reach of anti-semitic violence (recently revealed to be al-Qaeda related, even) outside of the Middle East.

What changed for me, five years ago? As an historian, very little. The market for Asianists got a bit tighter, as the market for MidEast and Islamic specialists got better. I stopped having to work so hard to explain the terror of the Cold War, the potential of sudden death and the existence of ideologically and politically hostile entities on a world-wide scale. Changes in Japan since then have been subtle, and mostly not at all linked to our own national trauma. Hardly anyone, still, has made any substantial links between Japan’s history of suicide attacks and terrorism with our current situation, but I don’t see there being all that much to say about it except to suggest that people would be less surprised if they paid attention. I remain convinced that paying attention to historical evolution and forces is one of the best ways to anticipate problems and sometimes even to find solutions. Airport security changes have rarely affected us — though our 7-month-old got randomly selected for special screening, and they really did pat him down.

Historians really don’t do anniversaries (though we try to remember our spouses and parents as appropriate). The press does, because it’s easy to count by years, or fives, or tens, or twenty-fives, or hundreds, and then they come talk to us or to people who were directly involved [via], and we get an odd sort of retrospective and update. Historians don’t care about even numbers: for us, the “Sixties” ended with the Vietnam War, and both the 18th and 19th centuries were “long” ones; every “20th century” course I’ve ever taken started in 1890. But outside of the journalistic need for a “hook” to look back, there’s nothing special about five years.

There’s nothing all that special about 9/11, either…. yet. What meaning 9/11/01 will have, its historical import, is still up in the air, no matter how much anyone claims that it must mean this or that, that things have or haven’t changed as a result. 9/11 was the largest act of terror to strike the United States, just as the Holocaust was the largest anti-semitic genocidal event, but neither of them stands alone and to focus all our attention on those events of such distinctive scale to the exclusion of myriad “smaller events” before or since is historically stunted, or dishonest. That so many people were so shocked by the event, and have yet to put it in anything like proper context or perspective, suggests to me that historians — not alone among scholars, but perhaps uniquely — have a long way to go in inculcating (recovering) our long-term vision, our sense of complexity of the world, our experience — indirect but nonetheless real — with cultural and ideological and technological change and conflict.

China/Gender/General/Identity/Imperialism/Qing

Elvis is everywhere

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 2 Comments

Elvis in China

A nice little picture from Shenbao, one of Shanghai’s most important early 20th century newspapers. The caption complains about Chinese women. Specifically it points out that Chinese women have taken up the habit of smoking on the street, and that when Westerners see them doing it they point out that in the West women don’t even smoke at home, much less in the street. Yet another example of how different commodities fit differently in different societies. Smoking is a particularly tricky one (not the most relevant link, but the best film of struggling with use of cigarettes I could find.) The cigarette is the best way to walk around while smoking, and to make smoking a part of all your everyday activities, rather than a separate social space, like gathering around an opium pipe or a complex tobacco pipe. For a western woman to smoke in the street at this point would have been a defiance of gender roles. For a Chinese woman it marks you as modern. The caption-writer seems to be trying to create a less brazen definition of modern Chinese femininity. It seems to have worked, too, since Chinese women today are a lot less likely to smoke in public than men.

Of course the picture is also cool because it seems to be an early Elvis sighting.

General/Japan

Self-intro: M.G. Sheftall

Posted on by M.G. Sheftall / 28 Comments

Mina san, konnichiwa.

My name is M.G. Sheftall. I’m an ex-pat NY’er (attended and Stuyvesant High School and Fordham University there) living in Japan since 1987. I am currently an associate professor at Shizuoka University in Hamamatsu City, Japan and a PhD candidate at the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies at Waseda University.

First of all, I must say I’m happier than a kaeru during tsuyu to be joining the official posters’ lineup here on Frog in a Well. I’ve been a lurker on this site for quite a while now, and am familiar with many of the bylines around here from various books and articles I’ve read over the years (and coincidentally, I’ve just recently finished Brian McVeigh’s magisterial Nationalisms of Japan, which I cannot recommend highly enough to students of the collective ways and mores of the residents of our favorite archipelago). I’d also like to say that I’m very much looking forward to interacting with you all from hereon out on a regular basis, and I hope I’ll be able to overcome innate cognitive shortcomings and temperamental proclivities to contribute more than politically incorrect irreverence and obtuse, misanthropic observations to these proceedings (although I can’t make any promises, especially once classes start up again next month). Yoroshiku. 

Some personal background info towards the tiresome yet nevertheless de rigeur “How did you end up in Japan?”: 

Japan has been a personal obsession since I was a preschooler — literally. The details of this nascent Orientalism are convoluted and possibly Freudian, involving a Japanese exchange student babysitter, a viewing of You Only Live Twice with my dad in 1967, and finding my grandmother’s awesome National Geographic stash shortly thereafter. Things became progressively monomaniacal after I watched Tora! Tora! Tora! in 1970 and decided that my goal in life was to become a Zero fighter pilot. Needless to say, the Imperial Japanese Navy security clearance background check and citizenship requirements posed ultimately insurmountable obstacles, but I think we can all begin to see the pattern forming here.

In spite of the numerous distractions and temptations that came with the territory of a “dazed and confused” 1970s New York City adolesence, a bud of J-longing remained safely sequestered in my youthful bosom, glowing and intact, merely waiting for the right circumstances under which to reach full blossom. However, fate was to intervene with yet another impressionable cinematic experience that, in this particular case, detoured me quite catastrophically from my destined path in Japan Studies: a viewing of Apocalypse Now at the Ziegfeld Theater — bolstered in effect by consideration of the financial circumstances of a household facing two additional sets of tuition bills just a few more years down the line — somehow convinced my fragile eggshell 17-year-old mind that I should turn down Columbia University in favor of a tuition-free education at West Point via an appointment to the Academy from Congressman Bill Green (R/NY) in January 1980. So-o-o, it was goodbye Donald Keene, hello M-16.

Although there were many aspects of the soldier’s life I enjoyed (e.g., firing automatic weapons; experiencing temporary ego death in the testosterone-fueled, cadence-chanting, buzzcutted anonymity of The Group), and others for which I displayed a natural ability (I shined a mean shoe, for instance), it eventually became clear to all involved that my talents might be better applied in an endeavor other than the profession of arms. After two years at The Point, the Academy and I reached the amicable — if perhaps a tad premature — decision to part ways, leaving me free to meander back home to Manhattan neither with my shield nor on it (sticking to the allegory, the Spartan in a similar situation might have opted to fall on his sword, but I am an innate self-preservationist), and I enrolled at Fordham University in the Bronx a few months later. Alas, there was no Japanese Studies program at this fine Jesuit institution, but I opted for something I thought sounded almost as exotically intriguing and considerably more timely — a concentration in Islamic/Middle East Studies as a Poli Sci/International Relations major.

One thing led to another at Fordham, some roads led nowhere, and none (thank God) led to Baghdad, but a fortuitous phone call from an ex-roomie landed me in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan in February ’87, a few months shy of my twenty-fifth birthday, and I’ve been a Nihongo and kanji freak pretty much since stepping off the 747. My on-topic professional research activity from about the mid-90s on was decidedly job-oriented, concentrating on culture-specific (or at least culture-salient) affective variables in the context of the Sisyphean realities of Japanese EFL. Anyone who has 1) “done the Eigo/Eikaiwa thing” for any length of time and 2) has a working knowledge of Japanese cultural studies should readily understand how this particular research interest — nudged in my case by concurrent initial encounters with Karel van Wolferen, Ian Buruma, Bruce Stronach and Harumi Befu — eventually led me to focus on Japanese cultural/national identity issues.

I wound up in the Japanese national university system as a full-timer in Spring 2001 all set to continue in this vein…then 9/11 happened and everything, as the saying goes, changed. Several stunned months of insomniac BBC and CNN viewing and sobering ruminations on the dialectic of national/ethnic/religious identity and ideologies of self-sacrifice eventually led me to Googling “kamikaze” one day in January 2002 and stumbling onto a veterans’ association of kamikaze survivors (yes, as oxymoronic as that may sound, there actually are some) based in Setagaya, Tokyo. I have been studying and observing the history, rituals and pedagogical activities not only of this association but of the entire Japanese subculture of kamikaze collective memory ever since. A book, BLOSSOMS IN THE WIND: HUMAN LEGACIES OF THE KAMIKAZE, resulted from the first three years of this research. This was published in English by NAL Caliber in 2005 (paperback in 2006), and a J-translation will come out from Bungei Shunju some time next year.

My dissertation at Waseda is a continuation of work on this theme, after anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace’s classic “Revitalization Movement” concept, aiming to model veteran-centric collective memory formation in traditionally exclusivist sociopolities that have experienced catastrophic military defeat and subsequent foreign occupation. My methodology owes much to the substantial literature in this field dealing with the experience of the post-Civil War American South, especially the work of C. Vann Woodward, Rollin Osterweis, Gaines Foster and Charles Reagan Wilson. Partly in acknowledgment of this methodological debt, but more importantly because I just love the way it reads, the title of the dissertation will be Gone With The Divine Wind: the Kamikaze in Japanese ‘Lost Cause’ Mythology, 1945-Present.

Additional (but very much related) research interests for me are: military influence in the formation of Japanese national identity from Meiji to the present (I’m a big Yoshida Yutaka fan, btw); Yasukuni issues (2006 has been a great year for these!); popular Japanese attitudes towards — and interpretations of — modern history, particularly regarding the Asia-Pacific War; the relationship of culturally-patterned masculinity and formalized violence; depiction of the Asia-Pacific War in popular culture/media; (as per the above paragraph, the numerous and endlessly fascinating) parallels between the cultural, ideological, pedagogical and psychological mechanisms of dealing with the aftermath of defeat in postwar Japan and post-Civil War American South (my ancestors on both sides of the family were Confederates, so there is an element of personal interest on my part in exploring this aspect of the respective collective experiences of both my ancestral and adoptive cultures), et al.  

***** 

A quick personal profile:

Family: Married, two sons (eight and three years of age, respectively).

Currently listening to:  Station-to-Station, by David Bowie; The Sand Pebbles soundtrack (Jerry Goldsmith, RIP)

Currently reading: Kudakareta Kami by Watanabe Kiyoshi (a kind of Rosetta Stone of postwar J-veteran trauma; now I can see why Dower thought it was worth devoting six pages of “Embracing Defeat” to…Powerful stuff!)

Favorite Japanese movies: Yojinbo; Kumo no Bohyou yori Sora Yukaba (hands down the best kamikaze movie ever made)

J-turn-ons: Hokusai woodblocks; hanabi; the gracious art of tatemae displayed in consideration of others’ feelings; winsome smiles; the Imperial Palace o-hori walkway near Chidorigafuchi, at night, under cherry blossoms; prewar J-Art Deco (Waseda campus has some nice examples, btw); crisp autumn breezes; Nihonshu and oden on winter nights

J-turn-offs: requests for personal anatomical data, particularly from strangers; any and all comments/lines of questioning about chopstick/Nihongo ability and/or edible/inedible Japanese foods; Nihonjinron genre (comedic value aside); self-serving, obsequious tatemae; just about any building erected in Japan since about 1965 (although I do like the Asahi Beer corporate headquarters); 95% of J-television programming; tsuyu and summer weather in Central Japan

前世 existences: Post-Impressionist painter; Chuushingura co-conspirator; Greek hoplite; Egyptian architect.

*****

Dewa, mina san, yoroshiku onegaishimasu.

China/Education/General/Post-Mao/Teaching

Braudel in Shanghai

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 2 Comments

There has been a good deal of comment on Chinese history textbook revisions of late. Mao is gone! For foreigners who can only name one Chinese historical figure this must be troubling. The project is supported by Zhu Xueqin, and according to one of the authors of the new textbook they are trying to take a more Braudelian approach, emphasizing social change over politics. According to Zhou Chunsheng,

“History does not belong to emperors or generals,” Mr. Zhou said in an interview. “It belongs to the people. It may take some time for others to accept this, naturally, but a similar process has long been under way in Europe and the United States.” via NYTimes

I have not seen the textbooks, but at least for the pre-modern period it seems like a good change. Memorizing a list of dynasties and events without making any attempt to explain why they matter is bad history teaching, and it seems to be common in China. Dropping the whole revolution is bad, but perhaps better than doing the old revolutionary catechism. Needless to say there has been some controversy. Danwei has a nice summary.

The thing I found most interesting is that almost all the Western commentary claims that it is Chinese textbooks that are being revised. Actually it is just in Shanghai so far. The old narrative of Chinese history stressed class struggle, that the ordinary people of China were being oppressed, mostly by foreigners, but also by fellow Chinese. I like most of Zhu Xueqin’s ideas, but I also suspect that Shanghai authorities like his ideas in part because if anyone is oppressing people in Anhui today it is likely to be people from Shanghai. Emphasizing harmony and unity over the revolutionary power of the exploited masses is probably a good idea, and also fits in well with the interests of the Shanghai elite.

Archaeology/China/General/Nationalism

Shine on you crazy diamond

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Have you been to the British Museum? One of the best museums in the world, largely because it contains the loot of empire, stuff the Brits brought back from all over the place, mostly from the days when archeology was more like looting. They have the Elgin Marbles which have been the source of a good deal of controversy, with the Greeks wanting it back and the Brits not wanting to return it.

One of the jewels of the BM collection is the Diamond Sutra from Dunhuang, the world’s first printed book.

Diamond Sutra

Although it was “acquired” by Aurel Stein under conditions that would not pass muster today, as far as I know the Chinese have not asked for it back. This is a bit surprising to me. Part of it is that the whole reclaiming antiquities thing seems to be less common in East Asia then in the West. I think it also has to do with where things fit into the popular mind. Greeks want the Elgin Marbles back because they are masterworks of Greek art and they are Greeks. China has requested some stuff from An-yang back, but they have not, as yet, been interested in this. Maybe it’s just a matter of time before Chinese nationalists start demanding back the treasures of Chinese culture all over the world. I suspect that even then the Diamond Sutra would not be as big a deal for China since being Buddhist it may fit less well into modern Chinese conceptions of the treasures of Chinese culture than it does for westerners. It’s one of those things which seems, to me anyway, to loom larger in the foreign concept of China than the Chinese one.

Academia/Archaeology/Art/Blog Carnival/Current/Recent Events/English/Gender/General/Historiography/Japan/Memory/Museums/Nationalism/Politics/Religion/Teaching

History Carnival #38

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 9 Comments

“For both nations and inviduals have sometimes made a virtue of neglecting history; and history has taken its revenge on them.” — H. R. Trevor-Roper “The Past and the Present: History and Sociology” (1969), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 197.

Welcome to the September 1, 2006 edition of history carnival. I’m finally hosting a carnival with a number as high as my age! In honor of the quotes meme making the rounds, I’m going to use my personal quotation file as, um, decoration around the rich collection of material in this carnival. As usual, I’m making up categories as I go along: anyone who treats them as strict or comprehensive cataloging gets what they deserve!

Continue reading →

Archaeology/Colonial/Korea/Korea-Japan/Koryŏ/Late Chosŏn/Law/Libraries/Museums

History news round-up (brought to you by the Korea Times)

Posted on by Owen / 0 Comment

For some reason the Korea Times seems to be quite a decent source of history news these days, so in the absence of a more heavyweight post, here’s a round up of articles I’ve come across in the last week or so:

A couple of weeks ago the Korean Supreme Court released a bundle of court rulings from the early colonial period for the first time. The rulings date from 1912-1914 and the article notes how at that time custom still had an important influence on how the law was executed:

The court acknowledged concubines and gave supreme rights to the eldest sons of families. A person’s legal capacity was decided not by his or her age but by whether he or she had the intelligence to determine gains and losses.

Last week it was announced that a number of Chosŏn royal seals are missing, having been lost by various Korean museums. This is really not good for Korean museum PR:

The Board of Audit and Inspection also said that the surface of a royal seal made for the concubine of King Sonjo rusted away and a turtle-shaped seal, made of jade for the wife of King Sonjo, had been destroyed.

They said that every one of the of 316 seals owned by the National Palace Museum of Korea had been damaged in some way.

Two wooden ships found off the coast of China last year have turned out to be extremely rare examples of Koryŏ flat-bottomed wooden ships.

“It provides evidence that flat-bottom ships could sail as far as Shandong Province. Flat-bottom is a unique feature of ancient Korean ships unlike Chinese ships that had relatively pointy-shaped bottoms,” Choi Hang-soon, professor at the Department of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering at Seoul National University, told The Korea Times.

“It seems the Koryo ships arrived in the Chinese port, and had some big repairs there,” said Choi, who participated in the international academic conference on the ancient ships last week in Penglai.

And finally… A KT student guest columnist lauds the philanthropic attitude of Chosŏn dynasty sŏnbi (Confucian scholar-officials). This is something that interests me a lot as I’m planning to do some research on the ‘gift economy’ in Chosŏn Korea. However, I must admit that I can’t help being a bit put off an article when I see empty catchphrases like ‘sŏnbi spirit’ being thrown around and I’m not entirely convinced about the idea of seeing members of the exclusive and exploitative yangban class as moral models for our age, however philanthropic they may have been. Actually I could criticise numerous aspects of that column, but that would seem rather misanthropic of me…

China/General

Sharing syllabi

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

As is becoming a timeless tradition here at Frog in a Well, I am posting my syllabi for comment and suggestions. Not much China stuff this semester. I am stuck teaching Modern Japan (actually, I kind of like Japan) so there is not much China stuff. I am trying a bit more primary source stuff in the Japan class. I am also teaching ASIA 200, our introductory course on Asian Studies. I posted a version of this before, and made a few changes based on what people told me. (Sorry, the old version is now gone, but I really did make some changes.) I was aiming at something inter-disciplinary and Pan-Asian, but I think I ended up with something that looks like it was done by a China historian.

Archaeology/China/China-Japan/English/General

Miscellany

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

Via HNN

From other sources:

China-Japan/Current/Recent Events/English/General/Japan

Miscellany

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 1 Comment

Heard on a Prairie Home Companion Joke Show:

A couple goes to the theater, and afterwards the woman turns to the man and says “I don’t get Japanese theater!”
The man looks at her and says “What part of “Noh” don’t you understand?”

Attempts to upgrade hanko security [via].

Nanjing massacre deniers hit with defamation lawsuit in China. Being a Chinese lawsuit, it has no legal force in Japan as such, but it does raise interesting issues about liability when working with oral history and living testimony. [via] In other Nanjing massacre news, plans to make a movie about the atrocity. [via] They’re calling it a Chinese equivalent to “Schindler’s list”: They could make a thoroughly parallel film by focusing on John Rabe…. The plan is to debut next year on the 70th anniversary.

New book I want to read: Karen Nakamura, Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity [via and] Disability must be one of the last aspects of diversity which remains understudied in Japanese studies.

Weak: Japanese anti-Global Warming propoganda. Seems to me that a simple coastline revision would be dramatic enough….

English Teacher Imports Decline in Japan, for several years. About time?

Update: Ralph Luker’s catalog of women history bloggers includes a few of our own!

Academia/English/Gender/General/Historiography/Japan/Pedagogy

Sharing Syllabi: Japanese Women

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 2 Comments
Smaller Volleyball Immortals

I saw the immortals overlooking the volleyball court on our recent visit to the Kona side of the island, and felt an affinity. The Waikoloa Hilton is like that. It’s a massive resort complex, complete with its own trams and boat shuttles, littered with art both ridiculous and sublime, much of it Asian in origin or theme. The odd juxtaposition of beach party atmosphere and cultural decor which triggered my professional interest was mitigated only by the fact that our four-year-old still won’t slow down much for art. It all seemed like such a metaphor for Asianists in the American academy…

Anyway, I thought I’d continue the series we started last year and talk about my one Asia-related course this semester: Japanese Women. This is the second time I’ve taught it, and I’ve arranged things quite a bit differently. (First syllabus here) Some things are the same: strong emphasis on primary sources for class discussion and secondary scholarship in the hands of students — reading, presenting, writing about. Like last time, it’s a large group (almost thirty) and it’s a mix of history majors, Japanese studies majors, women’s studies majors (the class counts for major credit in all three departments) and students taking the class out of general or specific interest; lots of juniors and seniors, and — unlike last time — a cadre of students who’ve had classes with me before.

Some of the material I’m using this time is the same: Murasaki’s Diary, As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams, Hane’s Reflections on the Way to the Gallows, Bumiller’s Secrets of Mariko. I dropped Anne Walthall, The Weak Body of a Useless Women: Matsuo Taseko and the Meiji Restoration because, as much as I liked it, it was hard for students to see through the politics and exceptional nature of the character to deal with the gender issues (I’m going to be teaching a Meiji seminar in the Spring, though, and I’m bringing it back then). I added two books to compensate: Smith/Wiswell’s classic The Women of Suyemura and the recently translated Women of the Mito Domain by Yamakawa Kikue. I’m more excited about the former than the latter, though the little bit of Yamakawa that we used as a ‘warm-up’ reading this week worked quite well. As much as possible, I like to use autobiographical writing, or first-hand observation. And, like last time, students get to write short papers, priming the pump for discussions, on each of these works.

What’s changed, more than anything else, is the structure of the class. Last time I interspersed student presentations of secondary scholarship and my own lectures with the primary source readings; this time we’re reading primary sources first, with some lectured background, followed by student presentations/discussions of secondary materials (either a monographic work or multiple article/chapters on a subject). What I’m hoping is that this will give students more time and better background before they select their topics and sources

One of the first assignments was to go on the web and see what kinds of information about Japanese women’s history they could find. The results were quite diverse. Some of it came straight from the google search, but there were some outlying items as well, and some high quality resources. I perhaps spent more time than necessary talking about how obsessive interests can be valuable resources for historians and other scholars, and the collective intelligence of the internet. Students did notice the distinct lack of material relating to medieval/early modern women (except geisha) and the odd martial fixation of some of the highest ranked sites. With regard to the big gap between classical and modern women, I am still struggling to find good primary sources which cover that period. I could assign some of the early Tokugawa literature or Noh drama, but I’d prefer some diaristic or autobiographical material, and I just can’t find much.

I might have other syllabi to talk about in the next few weeks. In addition to a upper-level seminar on Meiji Japan, I’ve just been tagged to teach a course in our US-China Masters program, on “Problems and Issues in Contemporary China”; I’ll be giving it an historical spin, of course!

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