Blog Carnival/General/Japan

Upcoming Carnivals: Bad History, Asian History

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

I will be hosting the next edition of the Bad History Carnival here on Mondayearly Tuesday: you have until Sunday morning to get me the worst atrocities and best smackdowns of the web since mid-March. There’s a lot out there: I’ve already got some submissions, and I’ve got a few tucked away in my files, but I know there’s more, and I want to see it get the attention it deserves! BHC will be going monthly from this point forward: we’ve got hosts (I’m pretty sure) lined up through about November, but there’s always room for more!

The next edition of the Asian History Carnival is scheduled for Friday, July 7th: We’re still looking for a host, though, as well as for future editions; if you can’t do it this time around, look ahead and find a month you like, because the field is pretty open at this point.

General/Japan/Japanese

民団と総連の和合について

Posted on by kosho / 1 Comment
民団と総連が歴史的な和解をしたというのをご存知の方も多いと思われます。
しかし、物事を冷静に見ることのできない人たちたちによって、この和解の意味が悪い方向に転化されようとしています。
櫻井よしこという極右ジャーナリストから、日本の全国紙まで、ほとんどのメディアがこの和解の持つ意味を曲解しているわけです。
この和解のもつ意味において非常に重要なことは、今回、民団の団長選挙で朴チョンヒの維新政権の流れを汲む人間ではなく、韓国の民主化闘争の流れを汲む人が当選したということ、民団内の民主化の第一歩を踏み出したということだと思います。その結果、今回の和合がなされたというのが最大の要因のひとつです。
それを、北朝鮮の陰謀のように伝える人がいるということに、悪意を感じます。
朝鮮問題、在日問題は本当に難しい。
しかし、それを真剣に、真摯に考えなくては「日本」の未来は暗く閉ざされたままです。
来るべき東アジア共同体形成のために、まずは歴史を冷静に見る視点を養いたいと思います。
China/Classics/General/Literature/Poetry

Six Dynasties blogging

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

One of the things I have been doing for fun this summer is reading Family Instructions for the Yen clan 顏氏家訓by Yen Chih-t’ui 顏之推 (T’eng Ssu-Yu trans Leiden 1968) Yen Chih-t’ui (531-591 C.E.) was a literatus and court official under the Liang dynasty the Northern Ch’i, the Northern Chou and the Sui. He wrote extensively on religion, etymology, phonology etc.

He was also apparently a blogger, or at least that is what I gather from reading the section in the Family Instructions entitled “On Essays”

As for writing essays to mold your own nature and spirit or to give others unembarrassed advice, if you penetrate to the interesting part, it is also a pleasure. If you have leisure after your other activities you may practice essay writing.

Being able to write good essays does not necessarily bode well for your career. He points out that “many men of letters have suffered from a light (mind) and a sharp (tongue).” He then lists a litany of famous essayists who came to bad ends, including Ch’u Yuan who ended up drowning himself when the king disregarded his words, Li Ling, a general who was captured by barbarians, Feng Ching-t’ung who was not promoted and then was dismissed because of his unstable personality and Wu Chih who calumniated and alienated his fellow countrymen. Perhaps most interesting was Tso Ssu who, in order to produce good poetry had his house and garden furnished at every turn with tables and materials for writing so that he could write down his ideas whenever they occurred to him. (obviously he needed wi-fi in the house) When Tso Ssu finished his fu poem describing the capitals of the Three Kingdoms so many people wanted to copy it that there was a shortage of paper in Loyang. (sort of an early version of a server overload.)

While there are some essay-writers who have come out well, both in a career sense and in a moral sense most of them come out badly.

. . . a body of essays exhibits the writers interests, develops his nature, and makes him proud and negligent of control as well as determined and aggressive.

The main problem is that they seem to get wrapped up in their own wonderfulness

A proper expression of one fact or a clever construction of one sentence make their spirits fly to the nine skies, and their pride towers over (the other writers) of a thousand years. They read aloud again and again for their own enjoyment, forgetting other persons nearby. Moreover, as a grain of sand of a pebble may hurt a person more than a sword or spear, their satirical remarks about other persons may spread faster than a storm.

Some of them in fact get so tied up in themselves they loose all touch with reality. Specifically, they can’t tell if they are writing nonsense or not.

In this world I have seen many people without the slightest literary talent who consider themselves elegant, flowery stylists, while spreading their awkward and stupid writings. . .Recently in Ping-chou an aristocratic scholar liked to compose ridiculous poems, challenging Hsing, Wei, and other eminent writers. All of them mocked and falsely praised him; but he was so excited that he prepared feasts to entertain those with literary reputations. His wife, an intelligent woman, admonished him against (this folly) even with tears. The gentleman said with a sigh, “Even my wife cannot appreciate my talents; how can I expect much from strangers?”

Yen also includes various small tips about writing. One should avoid the use of the phrase 敬同 -respectfully echoed (indeed). One should also beware of misusing literary allusions. This is more tricky than you might think, since “”the miscellaneous tales of the many schools of philosophy are occasionally different, and their works have usually been lost or unavailable.” He then lists a series of little errors he has found in the writings of others. Needless to say he thinks these errors of his opponents are worth being preserved for the next thousand and a half years, and so he includes them, supposedly as a form of instruction, but I think just as a bit of pettiness.

It really is a fun book.

Academia/Books and Articles/China-Japan/Cultural/Current/Recent Events/English/General/Japan/Literature/Memory/Pedagogy/昭和/江戸

Laughter and Tears on the Charles

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 4 Comments

A book I’ve been waiting for for a long time is finally almost out [PDF]. Adam Kern, an old friend from graduate school, has been working on Edo-period humor, especially kibyoshi visual humor:

Curious, he brought some of the books to his literature professor, who offered no comment because, he said, kibyoshi were really art. So Kern brought the books to his art professor, who also offered no comment because, he said, kibyoshi were really literature.

This is one of those cases, obviously, where the old disciplinary boundaries have created gaps in our knowledge that didn’t need to exist. No more. There have been books on the history of Japanese humor before, but I’ve never felt that they captured any of the actual fun being had by the authors of haikai, senryu, satirical enga or kyogen. It’s a cliche that the best way to kill humor is to analyze it, and I don’t think it’s entirely true, but that’s certainly been the model to date. Adam, however, is a genuinely funny, and very smart, guy and I look forward to seeing the results.

At the other end of the Charles (I say that, but of course neither MIT nor Harvard is anywhere near an “end” of the Charles, except in the solopsistic Cantabridgian sense), Prof. Peter Perdue has offered another review of the MIT Visualizing Cultures controversy. Most interesting is his differentiation between the censorial rage of “Chinese Students and Scholars Association, a student group comprised of graduate students from the People’s Republic of China,” and the “Chinese alumni of MIT [CAMIT]”:

If some future social scientist used this correspondence as “data” for a research project, she might conclude: “A content analysis was done of the opinions contained in the complete database of e-mail correspondence, arranging them on the following ordinal scale from 1 to 5: 1. Dower and Miyagawa were completely justified in their project; the students’ actions were ridiculous and embarrassing; 2. The Website contained some unintentionally offensive portions, indicating the need for some clarification, but it should be restored as soon as possible with warnings about the need to view its content carefully; 3. The site was unbalanced, because it leaned too much toward the Japanese perspective; it needed to include Chinese materials and be substantially revised; 4. The Website indicated such bias against the Chinese people and in favor of Japanese militarism that the Website should be suppressed, MIT should apologize, and Profs. Dower and Miyagawa should be fired; 5. Even more violent threats…

“A frequency distribution of the responses would find them arrayed in a normal distribution with its median at about 3.0, with the median response from members of CAMIT lying one or more standard intervals to the left (< =2.5), and the median response from members of CSSA lying one or more standard intervals to the right (>=3.5). There is most likely a significant statistical difference between the two populations, but this subject requires further research.”

This tongue-in-cheek chi-test comes from his own correspondence after he published his first defense of Dower and Miyagawa: the CSSA, though it’s been defended vigorously, if not entirely honestly, on H-Asia, was quite unrestrained in its attacks (the image of a student presenting Iris Chang’s unbalanced book to War Without Mercy author John Dower to “educate him” pretty much says it all) and demands. The MIT alumni were considerably more balanced and nuanced in their approach, and made it possible to find a solution, as Perdue says, pretty much in line with position 2, though he himself is working with Miyagawa and Dower to implement some more Chinese content to supplement.

China/Classics/Gender/General/Identity

Happy Father's Day

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 2 Comments

There are lots of Western holidays that don’t translate well to China. Christmas shows up a bit, especially since all the ornaments are made in Asia, but Easter, Halloween, Canada Day etc. don’t mean much. Mother’s Day and Father’s Day do translate however, and Mother’s Day has at least some popularity in Taiwan and Hong Kong and I think in China too. Father’s day is a harder sell, because the relationship between Chinese fathers and children is supposed to be fairly distant. Confucius’s relationship with his son Po-yu is the locus classicus

Analects 16.13

Ch’an K’ang asked Po-yu, saying, “Have you heard any lessons from your father different from what we have all heard?”

Po-yu replied, “No. He was standing alone once, when I passed below the hall with hasty steps, and said to me, ‘Have you learned the Odes?’ On my replying ‘Not yet,’ he added, If you do not learn the Odes, you will not be fit to converse with.’ I retired and studied the Odes.
“Another day, he was in the same way standing alone, when I passed by below the hall with hasty steps, and said to me, ‘Have you learned the rules of Propriety?’ On my replying ‘Not yet,’ he added, ‘If you do not learn the rules of Propriety, your character cannot be established.’ I then retired, and learned the rules of Propriety. “I have heard only these two things from him.”
Ch’ang K’ang retired, and, quite delighted, said, “I asked one thing, and I have got three things. I have heard about the Odes. I have heard about the rules of Propriety. I have also heard that the superior man maintains a distant reserve towards his son.” translation here

That a father should have a distant relationship with his son became a standard belief.
Mencius 4a18 expands on this a bit

Kung-sun Ch’âu said, ‘Why is it that the superior man does not himself teach his son?’
Mencius replied, ‘The circumstances of the case forbid its being done. The teacher must inculcate what is correct. When he inculcates what is correct, and his lessons are not practiced, he follows them up with being angry. When he follows them up with being angry, then, contrary to what should be, he is offended with his son. At the same time, the pupil says, ‘My master inculcates on me what is correct, and he himself does not proceed in a correct path.” The result of this is, that father and son are offended with each other. When father and son come to be offended with each other, the case is evil. ‘The ancients exchanged sons, and one taught the son of another. ‘Between father and son, there should be no reproving admonitions to what is good. Such reproofs lead to alienation, and than alienation there is nothing more inauspicious.’translation here

In other words, the teacher/student relationship and the father/son relationship are sufficiently different that they can’t be reconciled. A student can hate being criticized by a teacher (in fact they probably should), a student can see and even point out the hypocricies of a teacher’s behavior. None of these are appropriate with a father. There is supposed to be affection between fathers and sons, but fathers are never supposed to display it.

In the Family Instructions of the Yen clan the dangers are spelled out (all these from the Teng translation pp. 4-5)

Relations between parents and children should be dignified without familiarity; in the love between blood-relations there should be no rudeness. If there is rudeness, affection and fidelity cannot unite; if there is familiarity, carelessness and disrespect will grow. After sons receive official appointment, they and their father should occupy different apartments.

If this is not the case bad things will happen. A father may fail to discipline his son.

In the time of Liang Yuan-ti (r.552-54) there was a gifted and talented youth; his father loved him so much that his training was neglected. A single well-chosen word the father would praise for a whole year wherever he went; each evil act he would conceal and gloss over, hoping for self-reform. When old enough to marry and serve the state he became daily more rude and arrogant. It is said that Chou T’i disemboweled him for his ill-considered speech and consecrated a drum with his blood.

Also, there are things that a father should not discuss with his son.

Someone asked “Why was Ch’en K’ang fond of hearing that men of virtue kept their sons at a distance?” “That was” I replied. “due to the fact that men of virtue did not personally teach their sons.” The satirical couplets in the Book of Songs, the warnings against jealousy and suspicion in the Book of Decorum, the cases of rebellion and disorder in the Book of History, the ironic comments on depraved deeds in the Spring and Autumn Annals, the symbols of procreation in the Book of Changes, all these should not be mentioned between fathers and sons, and so were not personally taught.

Although the nature of the Chinese family changed a lot between the time of Yen Chih-t’ui (531-591 CE) and the present, but even in modern China a father is supposed to be pretty distant and disciplinarian. Mao had a famously rocky relationship with his father, in part I think because he was not willing to accept his father’s constant upbraiding. As Michael Sheng points out most of the stories of oppression that Mao told were fairly standard Chinese father stuff.

Academia/Japan

The Ethics of Book Reviews

Posted on by Morgan Pitelka / 3 Comments

Recently I stumbled upon an adulatory book review I wrote of Haruo Shirane’s Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Bashô, a book that made a big impact on me while writing my dissertation. I was desperate when a graduate student to publish a book review, and I tried submitting the piece to several journals, only to learn that book reviews are by invitation only! I wondered if perhaps the real problem was that Traces had already been assigned to more learned “scholars” than myself. (The Shirane review, by the way, ended up as a post on my about.com site at the time, the now defunct japaneseculture. I was the first “guide” for that site, between 1997-2000, when I jumped ship before going on the job market.)

I decided to write a review that no one would have been previously assigned because it was either too esoteric or on too boring of a topic. I chose a catalog from the Edo-Tokyo museum that I needed to read anyway for my research, and submitted the review to the ever generous but seriously peer-reviewed journal Early Modern Japan. Success at last! Something to put on my CV! Feeling confident, I took another shot with a review essay I wrote on a topic that was guaranteed to have slipped under the radar screens of competitive book-review writers the world over: catalogs of ceramics! I tried Monumenta Nipponica but was told even review essays were only by commission, alas, but struck gold with the online British Columbia Asia Review. I can only begin to imagine what a miniscule role these two humble pieces of criticism must have played in my job-hunting efforts, but they seemed important at the time.

Once I began publishing actual scholarship based on my own research, I discovered that journals ASK you to write reviews. I suppose this amounts to a kind of review process for reviewers? My most exciting review moment came about a year ago when the Journal of Japanese Studies asked me to review Andrew Watsky’s Chikubushima: Deploying the Sacred Arts in Momoyama Japan. I immediately and gleefully accepted this charge, largely because I wanted to receive a free copy of Andy’s beautiful but hardback-only book. (This perhaps reveals too much about the finances of an assistant professor living in an expensive metropolis . . .)

But AFTER I hit “send” on my acceptance message, I began thinking about the possibility that my review would represent a conflict of interest. First of all, Andy is my sempai. He went to Oberlin. I guess he is actually my triple sempai, if such a thing is possible. He also attended the Associated Kyoto Program and graduated before me from the Ph.D. program at Princeton, though in a different department. Perhaps more importantly, one of his essays appeared in an anthology I edited, Japanese Tea Culture. Did this plethora of connections mean I would be unable to review his book objectively?

In fact books are reviewed by friends, classmates, felllow disciples of this or that professor, and even former students and former teachers quite often. In my case, I tried to over compensate for our friendly connections by being quite critical in the review. (Andy’s book won the John Whitney Hall Prize, so you can see how sensible that choice was.) In other cases, though, you see reviewers playing softball and providing no meaningful constructive criticism whatsoever when reviewing books by friends or former classmates. Not helpful.

So is it our responsibility to declare such potential manefestations of giri? Do debts of gratitude have a role in criticism? Should friendship be “balanced” by severity?

China/General

Mao vs. Hitler

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 4 Comments

I’m not trying to make this blog all Mao all the time, but as we seem to be discussing him a lot, and Johnathan just brought up the issue of popular memory again, I thought I would toss in an interesting comparison. In Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones he interviews the actor/director Jiang Wen. Jiang was just coming out of a period of partial exile, and he was talking about his desire to make an honest movie about Mao. He was fascinated with him because

He’s a tragic figure – the most tragic in Chinese history…..Mao was more tragic then Hamlet. Mao was an artistic person, not a political person. He should have been a poet and a philosopher; he should have been creating things instead of dealing with politics….I think Mao has something to do with every Chinese person….He represents many Chinese dreams and many Chinese tragedies.p.349

The thing I find interesting about this is that it is the best expression I have seen of Mao as China’s national Rorschach test, the person Chinese people use when they want to think about China’s 20th century transformations. I think this is why American reactions to Mao and Chinese ones are always so different. In American popular memory to the extent he exists at all it is as a great monster like Hitler or Stalin. For Jiang Wen at least he is someone who is good to think with, in the sense that by thinking about him you can think about pretty much any of the issues in China’s recent history you are interested in.

Americans at least don’t really invest themselves in history that way. There was a big spat about Thomas Jefferson a few years back, over the question of his fathering a child with one of his slaves. His defenders wanted to claim that he did not, so we could shove him back on the family altar with Washington and the other plaster saints. He opponents wanted to make him out as Simon Legree. Coming to a popular understanding of Jefferson as a beacon of liberty and a slaveowner was just not going to happen.

I wonder if Mao may have passed his sell-by date in Chinese popular memory, however. Intellectuals of my age and older can still debate “Mao 60 percent good 40 bad or vice versa” through many bottles, but Jiang Wen seems to fantasize about making a big movie that would make this a public conversation and make himself what Michael Moore would like to be. Would younger people really care? Does he really work to help you think about the things that bother Chinese people today? I suppose he does, in that some of his statements about egalitarianism and anti-bureaucratism would still have a lot of resonance. Plus, using Mao to think with puts the party in a bad position.

China/English/General/Historiography/Maoist era (1949-1976)/Post-Mao

Forty Years Ago

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

The New York Times has a short interview with two women who played pivotal roles in the Cultural revolution

NIE YUANZI was an ambitious college professor whose “big character poster,” displayed on the grounds of Beijing University, was said to have ignited the Cultural Revolution, a prairie fire of violent purges and denunciations that quickly spread across the nation.

Wang Rongfen was a student of German at Beijing’s elite Foreign Language Institute who was imprisoned after writing a bold letter to Mao challenging his judgment in unleashing the self-destructive frenzy of his young vigilantes, the Red Guards.

The article says very little except that the Cultural Revolution is still something of a cipher in Chinese official history and even popular memory. What it doesn’t say, though it illustrates it reasonably well, is that the ever-so-slightly more open society which has emerged over the last decade or so has made it possible for these discussions to take place, to fill in some of the gaps.

Something which I’ve been pondering since Alan asked what the audience for revisionism is is somewhat clarified by this and by other revisionism I’ve seen lately. To some extent I think we academic historians overreact to overstated revisionist claims because what’s “under attack” is a much broader popular consensus sustained — in the case of China — by official orthodoxy and censorship. I think we need to continue to respond vigorously to new sources and new arguments — absorbing them where they are credible and publicly rejecting them where they are not — but I’m getting, I think, a little more sympathetic to those who are engaging with bad history in the popular and official arena.

Books and Articles/Colonial/Cultural/Korea/Korea-Japan

Hankyoreh on the return of cultural artifacts

Posted on by Owen / 0 Comment

Update:
Korea Times reports on another long-running dispute over the return of historical documents taken from Korea – in this case those taken from the Oe-Kyujanggak (Outer Royal Library) by the French in 1866. Apparently Korean scholars are unhappy about the fact that the South Korean PM has agreed with her French counterpart that the stolen documents can be exhibited in Seoul regularly as this may imply a weakening of the resolve to get them back permanently.

Original post
The English edition of the Hankyoreh newspaper has an editorial today praising the recent return of 47 volumes of an edition of the Veritable Records of the Chosŏn Dynasty (朝鮮王朝實錄) to Korea from Tokyo University. The edition was originally taken to Japan by the first governor-general of colonial Korea, Terauchi Masatake, but most of the 1,000 volumes were burnt in the fire that followed the Kanto Earthquake of 1923. It has been returned as the result of a civil society based campaign rather than government action.

A couple of interesting facts emerge from the editorial that I didn’t know before. One is that the Korea-Japan Treaty of 1964, negotiated by Park Chung-hee, specifically promised not to pursue the return of cultural items taken by Japan. This seems particularly ironic considering Park’s later very strong turn to a policy of cultural nationalism.

The other is the concrete figures it provides for Korean cultural artifacts overseas: 74,434 (confirmed items) of which 46 percent are in Japan. This got me to thinking about what this might mean in comparative terms. Is Korea significantly worse off than other countries around the world in terms of how much of its ‘national heritage’ has leaked out? Is it worse off than other developing countries or other former colonies? Are there more Indian, Greek, Nigerian or Iraqi cultural artifacts overseas? And what about Japan? As you can probably tell, I don’t know the answers to any of these questions.

Archaeology/China/China-Korea/English/General/Historiography/Japan/Ming

A simple Miscellany

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

Ralph Luker‘s uncovering of the wonderful linguistic debunkings of 1421 by Bill Poser and friends (in two parts; note: Is Menzies just making up words in Chinese, and if so, why do so many Chinese people seem to take him seriously? theory: he’s exploiting the linguistic uncertainty of diverse dialects.) reminded me that I’ve got a few other interesting links tucked away.

The archaeo-biological investigation of an imperial garden from the Southern Yue state (a breakaway from Qin not reconquered by the Han until 111 bce) has produced another claim of Chinese origins (the “wax gourd”) as well as some fascinating detail about foods and garden design. Also, more Koguryo finds in the oddly contested region (subscription required: this one’s free) will undoubtedly be cited by both sides.

Speaking of anniversaries: Andrew Meyer notes the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre and muses on its meanings. I don’t have anything new to say on the subject, so go read him.

China/General/Imperialism/Qing/Republican/Taiwan/War

Thank you for not smoking

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Today is 6-3 anti-opium day in the Nanjing period and Anti-Smoking Day on Taiwan. It commemorates Lin Zexu’s destruction of the British Opium at Humen. In honor of the occasion I ask our readers to limit themselves to legal intoxicants for the weekend.
Lin Zexu

p.s. does anyone have a picture of Hsu Zilin, the hip Taiwanese cartoon guy who urges young Taiwanese not to smoke?

China/Civil War/General/Nationalism/Republican/Social History

My Great Helmsman is Charlton Heston

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

In an interesting article on the gun trade and state control of weapons in Guangdong province in the 1920’s Qiu Jie and He Wenping make an interesting argument about the role of guns in Chinese politics. The article as a whole attempts to get at the level of armament in the province, which is of course difficult to do. Weapons came in from all sorts of places, military weapons, local production, the British in Hong Kong trying to stir up trouble. Guangdong produced a lot of overseas sojourners (the article focuses on the Pearl River delta) and they liked to help out the folks back home by buying them guns. Although guns flowed into the province throughout the 20s prices kept going up, (locally made rifles went from 40 yuan apiece in 1912 to 170 in 1928. Prices of handguns rose more slowly) indicating that there was still lots of demand. After some speculation on total numbers of guns the authors focus on the Guomindang Canton government’s attempt to license and tax weapons. This was initially a revenue move. During the warlord period states taxed almost everything and guns were a particularly attractive thing to tax. Gradually attempts to license guns came to be more focused on denying weapons to opponents of the state, most notably the Merchant Corps of Canton, which was always difficult to control.

The most interesting thing about the article is the conclusion. The authors conclude that Guangdong did not see the emergence of really serious local oppressors, (土皇帝) or of large-scale banditry because as a fairly prosperous area it was a well-armed area. As a result it was hard for any one family to dominate a local militia and hard for the state to control the people. Thus local independence grows out of the barrel of a gun.

I’m not sure I entirely buy this. I’m not sure things in Guangdong were really that good, or that this single explanation really explains it. Guangdong does seem a good deal less disastrous than many other areas during the warlord period, but then so does the Shanghai area, and I suspect this has more to do with the presence of a major urban area than with guns per se. What I do find interesting is the almost libertarian emphasis on guns and popular power. Chinese scholarship usually seems pretty state-centered, i.e. looking from the point of view of the state at the problem of controlling the people. (Or regarding the Nationalist state as evil and assuming the existence of a Communist counter-state) I don’t have much problem with a state focus, since the process of state-building was one of the most important parts of China’s 19th and 20th century, but it is nice to see civil-society type ideas being applied outside Shanghai.

邱捷，何文平“1920 年代广东的民间武器” in 一九二0年代的中国，社会科学，北京， 2005

bibliography/Books and Articles/Korea/Late Chosŏn/Libraries

Into the archives

Posted on by Owen / 1 Comment

Major source material publication projects for premodern history

A bit of a change of pace here, but I thought I’d share a bit of the information I’ve gathered from working on cataloguing Korean books in the library here at SOAS. Of course if you are uninterested in premodern Korean history or have a low boredom threshold this would probably be a good time to click away.

I’ve posted before about accessing the major Chosŏn dynasty annals online. These have formed the backbone of studies on premodern Korean history during the last few decades, but now it seems the emphasis is moving toward more detailed research using archival sources. What I mean by archival sources are all the surviving public and private documents from the Chosŏn period that tend to be called komunsŏ (古文書) in Korean. These sources are becoming increasingly available to researchers through a number of massive compilation and publication projects being carried out by some of the main organisations in Korea responsible for promoting the study of Korean history: namely the Academy of Korean Studies (韓國學中央硏究院); the National History Compilation Committee (國史編纂委員會); the Kyujanggak library of Seoul National University (奎章閣); and the Korean Classics Research Institute (民族文化推進會).

Below I will look in turn at the collections that each of these institutions is publishing and what they offer for historians. If anyone knows of any important ones that I have missed out, please feel free to let me know in the comments.

>>Academy of Korean Studies:

Komunso chipsong
Komunsŏ chipsŏng 古文書集成 (76 vols)
A very impressive collection of archival materials, often from the archives of individual clans/families, now at volume 76 and counting. It includes mainly facsimiles of the originals but also some transcribed versions too.

Han’gukhak charyo ch’ongsŏ
Han’gukhak charyo ch’ongsŏ 韓國學資料叢書 (36 vols)
Another very important collection which seems to have reached volume 36. The materials appear to be similar to those in the Komunsŏ chipsŏng collection but I think in this collection there is a greater preponderance of reprinted old books and diaries rather than komunsŏ as such. Among recent volumes are two covering the archives of the Pak family of Matjil village in Kyŏngsang province upon which the groundbreaking book ‘The Farmers of Matjil Village’ (맛질의농민들, 2001) was based.

Hanguk kanch'al charyo sonjip
Hanguk kanch’al charyo sŏnjip 韓國簡札資料選集 (6 vols)
A series of volumes of collected letters including quite a lot written in han’gul (called ŏn’gan 諺簡) which could be very interesting for research into Chosŏn social history. Seems to have reached at least volume 6.

>>National History Compilation Committee:

Hanguk saryo ch'ongso
Han’guk saryo ch’ongsŏ 韓國史料叢書 (47 vols)
This collection appears to be quite a diverse collection of historical documents, including many that are kept in collections outside of Korea. It turned out to be very useful for me as I discovered a whole new cache of documents relating to the topic of my thesis in one of the volumes dedicated to materials kept in Japan. It is also particularly great because most or all of these materials seem to be available online here.

>>Kyujanggak:

Komunso
Komunsŏ 古文書 (29 vols)
Straightforwardly enough, this is a series of collections of komunsŏ from the Kyujanggak archives. As one might predict, considering this was once the royal library, about half of them consist of collections of government documents. You can find some more information about the contents of the volumes here.

Kyujanggak charyo ch’ongsŏ I & II 奎章閣資料叢書
Another couple of volumes of materials from the Kyujanggak archives.

>>Korean Classics Research Institute:

Hanguk munjip ch'onggan
Han’guk munjip ch’onggan 韓國文集叢刊 (301 vols?)
I’m not sure whether this one really fits in this category, but it is certainly a publication mega-project that dwarfs the others, being a comprehensive collection of the collected works of Korean literati, or munjip. On the basis of the holdings in our library it seems to have reached volume 301, but it may have got further than that by now.

Current/Recent Events/Education/General/Japan/Law/Nationalism/Politics

Shades of Mori Arinori

Posted on by Nick Kapur / 1 Comment

Recently the Japanese Diet has been debating several competing bills to revise the Fundamental Education Law of 1947.  One of the most contested issues is an effort by the LDP to make instilling patriotism an explicit goal of Japan’s national education system, as it was under the education system devised by Mori Arinori in the 19th century and in force in Japan up until the US-led education reforms following World War II.  Reportedly, the original language was even stronger, but the LDP-backed bill that finally made it out of committee and onto the Diet floor still contained the relatively strong phrasing by Japanese standards, 我が国と郷土を愛する態度を養う (“to instill an feeling of loving our country and homeland”). Critics of this clause argue that it will promote militarism and inject further tension into already heated Japan-China and Japan-Korea relations, but the LDP-backed bill seems likely to pass largely as is within the next week or so.

In related news, it was reported this week that many Japanese schools are grading students on “love of country”.  A recent survey in Saitama prefecture found that at least 45 local schools evaluated “love of country” on report cards for 6th-grade students. Under current policy, individual schools are free to decide how report cards are structured and which categories are graded. Officials have argued that the practice is not objectionable because “instilling a feeling of love for one’s country” has already been one of the Ministry of Education’s stated objectives for 6th-grade social studies students for some time.

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