Miland Brown has the latest edition of the Asian History Carnival up at his World History Blog, and it’s a very nice collection.
We’re still looking for hosts for August and beyond, however: time to step up and make your mark in the historical blogosphere!
Or perhaps more to the point, what books are given the chance to sell? The other day I was in a local chain bookstore and took the following photo of the “World history” shelf ostensibly dedicated to China (and thus also Japan). I wanted to look in more detail at the books that are given shelf space in places like Borders and Barnes and Noble.Continue reading →
东亚三国的近现代史 A History of Modern and Contemporary East Asia is a book that got a lot of press when it first came out, since it was written by a team of scholars from China, Korea, and Japan, and is being published in all three languages. If you want ground zero of creating a common East Asian identity this book is it. Needless to say there are some problems with this whole project.
三国人民作为近邻，从很久以前就开始友好相处。但有时也发生争斗和战争。The people the three countries are neighbors, and have long had good relations. But at times there have been conflict and war. p.2
This is something of an understatement, since the book focuses heavily on the War (Two of the four sections deal with it.) This is a bit disappointing. Not to deny the importance of the war, or to suggest that we should miss a chance to point out how badly the Japanese behaved, but it does not help as much as it could in creating and East Asian history. In the Korean preface we are told that China and Korea have had a long relationship. In the modern period they have both been invaded by “other countries” (别国家) Obviously imperialism is a big part of the modern history of all these places, and the Japanese Empire is probably the most important aspect of imperialism. Focusing too much on the war, however, leaves very little room for comparative stuff on how the people in the various countries have dealt with the problems created by modernity.
The editors seem to be aware of this, however, and the book has a lot of sideboxes. In fact there is not much of a narrative thread at all, just bits and pieces of the stuff that would seem to go into a comparative re-thinking of East Asian history. Some of this is fairly mechanical. For instance in the section on women we get three short accounts of feminist pioneers from China, Japan, and Korea. These are the type of things the authors could have lifted from lots of other textbooks, and, as in other places, these bits seem to still be tied to national history.
Much more interesting is the section on the Independence, resistance, and social movements. 独立抵抗运动与社会运动 They open with a section on the Korean March 1st (Samil) independence movement of 1919. They then discuss the Chinese May 4th movement of the same year. They point out that May 4th was inspired by Samil, although they don’t take this as far as I would like. They also take both movements out of their national ghetto by calling them reactions to Wilson’s idea of National Self-determination. Next is a section on the “social movement” which includes a section on the plight of workers and peasants, accounts of the founding of Communist parties in all three countries, and an account of movements on behalf of outcastes in Japan and Korea.
All of these are movements or things that could be considered “anti”, especially if you look at them from the point of view of the Japanese state. How to tie them all together? The final part of the section is an account of the Kanto earthquake of 1923. (Actually they say 1932. Too many typos in here.) This was a big earthquake that killed a lot of people, but is also known for the massacres of Koreans and leftists that took place in its aftermath.
The authors point out that not only Koreans were killed. Chinese and rural Japanese were also attacked, in part because the police and mobs asked potential victims to pronounce “One yen fifty sen” to test their Japanese-ness. In addition to mob killings the police directly targeted known leftists. The authors claim that the Japanese authorities were afraid that the leftists would use the earthquake to tie together the various strands of popular thought, and so the police used people’s prejudice against Koreans, Chinese, and socialists to encourage attacks on scapegoats and take pressure off the government.
There are some problems with this. First, if the government really did think that Japanese leftists were capable of anything that organized and competent they were really ill-informed. The authors also don’t explain where “the people’s” dislike of Koreans and socialists came from or what it meant. “The Japanese state disliked them all” is a nice deus ex machina in linking all these things together, but it does not really work.
The approach is particularly weak when it comes to China. Focusing on Japanese ultra-nationalism is o.k. for understanding 20th century Japan, helpful for understanding Korea, and probably counter-productive for understanding China. It is significant that Mao and Chinese revolutionaries in general get very short shrift in here. No doubt the 1/3 of the authors who were from China were reluctant to get all revisionist on Mao, but more importantly the whole focus on Japanese imperialism puts a lot of China’s revolutionary history in the shade. I wonder how it would be different if they decided that Vietnam was part of East Asia.
Despite all that, I like the attempt. It almost feels like the beginning of Western Civilization as a concept, people casting around for the things that will tie together clearly related but also quite different histories. Sadly at least to start with in the modern period the Japanese imperialist make a good central pillar for this project.
I thought I’d write a quick post about another web resource I’ve just started to use quite a bit recently. This is the online Glossary of Korean Studies put together by the Academy of Korean Studies. I’ll start with a gripe: the search function doesn’t work in Firefox. Ok, now that’s out of the way I can say that I think this is an absolutely wonderful resource – it’s massive and generally seems very well put together. The methodology that they have used is to rely, where possible, on a body of English-language books on Korean history mainly written or translated by Western scholars as their basic source material for translations of Korean historical terms. Specifically, the books that seem to have been most commonly used are Yi Kibaek’s A New History of Korea, translated by Edward W. Wagner; James B. Palais’ Politics and Policy in Traditional Korea; Martina Deuchler’s The Confucian Transformation of Korea and Han Woo-Keun’s The History of Korea. Obviously there are limitations to this approach – most of these books are now quite old and more recent works may have opted for other translations. But in general they seem like a pretty good selection particularly since they are very respected and established works that all undergraduates studying Korean history are likely to encounter at some point or another.
In general I think it is a good idea that we have standardised translations of Korean historical terms as well as standardised transliterations (actually the AKS glossary provides transliterations in both the current government system and M-R). It can certainly be confusing reading about the Ministry of Taxation in one book, the Board of Finance in another and the Board of Revenue in yet another (I’m talking about the Chosŏn dynasty central government institution called the Hojo 戶曺). Having said that, I would be wary of advocating in principle that all scholars use the same terms. Clearly people might have very specific reasons why they prefer one translation to another or they might want to challenge a particular translation on the grounds that it is not an accurate reflection of the meaning of the original (Sino)-Korean term.
An example that I can give you from my own research is that of the terms sijŏn 市廛 and yugŭijŏn 六矣廛. You will usually find these translated as ‘licensed store/shop’ and the ‘six licensed stores’ (as they are in the AKS Glossary). This takes the character 廛 to mean a shop, which is in one sense correct as the term sijŏn did indeed refer to the merchants’ shops that lined the streets of central Seoul during the Chosŏn period. However, in practice, the terms sijŏn and yugŭijŏn actually referred to the groupings of merchants arranged into guilds according to the products they sold. When government documents refer to the sijŏn or yugŭijŏn they are referring to these merchants’ organisations that actually interacted with the government on behalf of the individual merchants. Thus in my work I always use the term ‘guild’ to translate sijŏn and ‘Six Guilds’ to translate yugŭijŏn as I think the translation ‘licensed stores’ can be quite misleading to the modern reader.
お久しぶりです。
先日、日本の毎日新聞が興味深い世論調査の実施していたのでご紹介します。ソースは以下のサイトです。まだ新聞そのものを見ていないので、具体的な質問内容や結果、対象人数など、分からないことが沢山ありますが、だいたいの傾向は分かると思われます。
http://www.mainichi-msn.co.jp/shakai/wadai/news/20060703k0000m040052000c.html
これは、主として日本国民と国会議員両者に対する戦争観についてのアンケートです。以下では国民の方のアンケート結果に関する記述のみ、簡単にまとめておきます。
Q１ 第二次大戦をめぐる日本政府の謝罪・反省について
A１ 十分（３６％） 不十分（４２％） 謝罪・反省は必要なし（１１％） 無回答など（１１％）
Q２ 対米開戦への評価
A２ 無謀な選択だった（５９％） やむを得ない選択だった（３３％）
Q３ 対中戦争で侵略的行為が行われたと思うか
A３ どちらとも言えない（４５％） 侵略だと思う（４０％）
Q４ 極東国際軍事裁判（東京裁判）への評価
A4 不当な裁判だが、戦争に負けた以上、やむを得なかった（５９％） 戦争責任者を裁いた正当な裁判（１７％） 戦勝国が一方的に裁いた不当な裁判（１０％）
・・・・・・・・・
この記事だけではちょっと情報が少なすぎて、判断するのが難しいのですが、個人的にはアジア・太平洋戦争について、それが「不可避」であったこと、侵略かどうかの判断のつけられない戦争であったこと、といった認識が思ったよりも多い印象を受けました。
ちなみに、２０００年５月にNHKが実施した世論調査では・・・
Q５ 先の戦争は、アジア近隣諸国に対する侵略戦争だった。
A５ そう思う（５１％） そうは思わない（１５％） 昔のことだから、自分には関係ない（７％） わからない・無回答（２８％）
Q６ 先の戦争は、資源の少ない日本が生きるためにやむを得ないものだった
A６ そう思う（３０％） そうは思わない（３５％） 昔のことだから、自分には関係ない（４％） 分からない・無回答（３１％）
となっています（吉田裕『日本人の戦争観』岩波書店、2005年、文庫版へのあとがき）。
質問の仕方や選択肢が違うので、安易に比較はできませんが、「やむをえない戦争」であったという認識が一貫して根強いことと、「侵略かどうか」という判断について、近年迷いが生じていること、ぐらいは読み取れるかもしれません。
以上、ご参考まで。
A few days ago I visited the Korean Folk Village near Suwŏn. You can learn all about the village from the English version of its propaganda video, complete with the standard blonde white foreigner and his beautiful Korean guide.
The folk village was much larger than I expected it to be and does a wonderful job of providing entertainment for visitors of all ages. The various artistic performances, pottery village, and other craft displays are all very impressive, and considerably less cheesy than the kind of cultural showcases I have seen elsewhere. To take one recent example of what I mean by cheesiness, I knew things would get bad when I was greeted at by ninja-clad parking attendants during a trip to Ueno city in Mie prefecture, Japan in 2004. That turned out to be only the beginning. By contrast, the folk village at Suwŏn has a wonderful feel about it, and it was smart enough to separate out the restaurants, souvenir shops, and amusement park from the central area and placed them all on each of the edges of the village.
The folk village at Suwŏn was put together a few decades ago and features a large collection of reproductions of buildings from all over Korea. It includes the houses of farmers as well as those of yangban, magistrates, and more prominent nobles. Depending on which description of the folk village you are reading, these houses are either described as “a late Chosŏn village” or “traditional” houses, or as displaying the “architectural wisdom of the Korean ancients.”
I am not qualified to evaluate much of what is on display, and since my knowledge of pre-modern Korean history is quite limited, I have little more than the average tourist’s intuitions to offer. But offer them I will, because there are a number of curious things about the folk village that I think it would be interesting to bring up for discussion here.
Continue reading →
How does one become a good person? That is a question that crops up a lot when one reads the Confucians. In fact, for Confucians the processes of self-cultivation and the questions surrounding it are absolutely central. Needless to say, Yen Chih-t’ui has stuff on this.
Partly one becomes good by hanging with good people. As Confucius put it
To live with good people is like staying in a room of orchids where, after a long time, one would naturally be sweet-scented; To associate with bad people is like living in a dried-fish shop, where one would unavoidably become imbued with the odor.p.461
Study (and self-cultivation more generally) are also important. One issue that comes up a lot is how ‘universal’ Confuican concepts of human perfectability are. Can anyone become good? Even Barbarians? How about women? Do we all become the same sort of good?
In the Ch’i dynasty (550-577) a eunuch and a palace attendant, T’ien Peng-luan, 田鹏鸞, was originally a southern barbarian. When he became a eunuch at the age of 14 or 15, he already had a desire for study. He always hid a book in his sleeves and would recite it in a low voice day and night. His position was low and the service toilsome: however, at any short respite he would hurry off to find some one he could question. Whenever he came to the Hall of Literary Galaxies, he panted and perspired and would say nothing beyond asking questions from books. When he saw some heroic or loyal deed of the ancients, he was always deeply moved, meditating for a long time. I had deep compassion and love for him and gave him double encouragement. Later on he was known and loved by the emperor, who granted him the name Ching-hsuan 敬宣, and raised his position to that of chamberlain with an independent office. When the last emperor of Ch’i fled to Ch’ing-chou [Shandong], The army of Chou captured him and asked the whereabouts of the Ch’i emperor. He deceived them, say that [the emperor] had already gone away and estimated that he should be beyond the border. Suspecting him of lying, they beat and lashed him to force him to submit. As each of his limbs was cut off, his speech and appearance became more severe than before; when his four limbs were cut off, he died. That a young barbarian boy by study could achieve such fidelity! How inferior are the generals and high ministers of Ch’i to this slave Ching-hsuan. p.73
So Yen, at least, claims that barbarians and eunuchs are capable of becoming good. Actually, they are even better than Yen himself, since he ended up serving four dynasties.
1 This quote is from 孔子家语, 4, 8b This makes it doubtful that the quote is actually from Confucius, but of course would have been regarded as his.
For readers interested in more early Western views of Korea and Koreans in a similar vein to those that Konrad has looked at in his series of posts here, Thomas Duvernay has posted chapters on Korea from John D. Ford’s 1905 travelogue An American Cruiser in the East at his website. (Actually the rest of his site on traditional Korean archery looks interesting too.) Good on him for putting this stuff out there for everyone to access.
Here’s a passage on Seoul that interested me since I am working on late Chosŏn commerce:
The shops are mean, and it is difficult to find fancy articles of Korean make. The best way to obtain curiosities is to let your wants be known as soon after your arrival as possible, name a place and date where you can be seen, and you will be waited upon by merchants who deal in such wares. Fans, antique metal-work, Korean coins and mats can be obtained in this way. The prices will be high, as the articles are rare and the owners not anxious to part with them.
It should be noted that by 1905 the merchants of Seoul had suffered from one blow after another (inflation, the collapse of government finances, loss of monopolies, massive currency devaluation and competition from Japanese and Chinese traders) so things may have been different had the author arrived some years earlier in the capital.
Welcome to the Sixth Edition of the Carnival of Bad History! I’m going to start with that most excellent material — that which is found and nominated by someone else — and then exercise my droit de rédacteur* and include some material I’ve gleaned over the last few months. The big news here is that after this last quarterly edition, we are going monthly! So don’t delay: get your posts in soon for the next one!
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“The enemy isn’t conservatism. |
One of the reasons I write this blog is to preserve things, mostly for myself. I often come across something that might be useful to teach with later, and blogging about things forces me to think things out a bit before I file them away. If you are the type of person that tends to procrastinate about thinking about things having a blog forces you to think a bit more promptly.
The other nice thing about blogging is that once you blog something you always know where it is. No hunting around your hard drive or god forbid filing cabinet to find a quote or an idea, just Google it up. Its like having an artificial brain.1
Being able to use technology to substitute for your lack of memory is a fairly new thing. Memory used to be the way people retained knowledge. Two examples. In Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters there are a number of George Orwell’s bits of literary criticism. At a number of points he quotes a bit of verse and says “I’m quoting from memory.” When I first read this I thought Orwell was a show-off. Eventually I figured out that he was being apologetic. All of these were fairly standard poems that any Englishman of his class would have memorized in school, and he was not bragging, but rather apologizing for being too lazy to go check the quotes. (He was almost always right.) I once saw Anthony Grafton give a paper and he told us that Italian Renaissance writers often misquoted the classics in their writing, as a way of asserting that they were working from memory, rather than looking up quotes like a bunch of clerks. (Of course these misquotes never involved mistakes in Latin grammar.) To be an educated person was to have memorized a lot of stuff. Part of this I suppose was the cost of books and the lack of standardized editions. If you found something worth knowing it behooved you to memorize it or, in Europe, to write it down in your commonplace book. Chances were you would never see it again. Modern scholarship tends to be built around remembering where to find stuff, rather than collecting it like a jackdaw.
Chinese literati also paid a lot of attention to memory. Memorizing the classics was part of becoming educated, and memorizing other things was valuable for lots of reasons. One of them is that education is a portable. In his Family Instructions Yen Chih-t’ui (531-591 C.E.), tells his children that
Those who have learning or skill can settle down anywhere. In these disordered times I have seen many captives who, though lowbred for a hundred generations, have become teachers through knowledge and study of the Lun yu and Hsiao Ching. Others, thought they had the heritage of nobility for a thousand years, were nothing but farmers or grooms, because they were unable to read and write. Seeing such conditions, how can you not exert yourselves? Whoever can keep steadily at work on a few hundred volumes will, in the end, never remain a common person. p.54
Yen lived in a society where being literate would mark you out even among aristocrats. He himself managed to serve under four dynasties, which is proof that you can get a long way by being educated. Part of the purpose of education is transforming yourself into a particular type of person (the Confucian self-cultivation thing) but part of it also is knowing enough stuff, and knowing it well enough, that you can use it in your conversation and writing. The ability to interact well with other aristocrats is pretty important. I think when he says you can go a long way by knowing Lun yu and Hsiao Ching. he does not just mean you should have read them. (They are pretty basic texts.) What he means is that you need to know the text, the commentaries, and the textual traditions associated with them well enough that you can hold your own. You need to become thoroughly conversant with things, and stay that way from constant review.
When a man is young his mind is concentrated and sharp; after maturity his thoughts and reasoning powers are scattered and slow. For this reason we should be educated early, so as not to loose the opportunity. When I was seven years old I could recited the fu poem describing the Ling-kuang palace, and by reviewing once every ten years I can still recall it. After my twentieth year, if I put aside for a month the classics I had read, then my memory was vague or confused. p.61
In fact the thing that he seems to be most worried about is that his family will embarrass themselves by committing a solecism.
Old literary allusions cited in speeches and writings should be personally checked, not based on hearsay. The so-called scholar-officials in the villages south of the Yangtze are usually not well educated, but as they are ashamed to appear mean and uncultured, they write what they know from hearsay evidence, using ill-fitted classical terms to embellish their sentences.p.77
He then goes on to list a bunch of silly mistakes caused by “learning by ear.” Access to texts, i.e. wealth and connections is part of getting to be properly educated. There more to learning than money, however. Lots of things are not clearly explained in texts. Classical allusions are not self-evident. Someone has to teach them to you, and you have to remember them. Place-names, proper pronunciations, and the origins of words, you need to know all of these. What if you mistook the 荇菜 plant for the 苋菜 plant? Or thought that a hill associated with an ancient hero was just a regular hill? Is it proper to refer to the owner of a puppet show as ‘Kuo the Bald?’ To us these sorts of questions don’t matter much because we see names as arbitrary. Yen is obsessed with questions of philology and phonology because he thinks understanding words will help us to understand the universe.Knowledge is not just a bunch of facts you can google up, or owning a bunch of reference books you can look for things it. It is becoming a type of person, and this is something that you can only do in your head.
1 Of course one drawback is that everyone and their brother can look into your brain
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.
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.
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.
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.