China/General

Do we want to judge?

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 9 Comments

Caleb Mc Daniel has a nice post on President Bush, and his recent claims that his policies in Iraq can only be judged by future historians. Caleb points out that this is a common dodge for politicians, but at the same time he, like me, seems a bit smitten by the high status this gives to historians. (Proper historians, of course, not revisionists.)

I must say I am a bit more conflicted about this than Caleb is. One of the things that my advisor was very satisfied with towards the end of his life was the way that the study of Republican China was becoming an academic issue. Fewer and fewer students wanted to re-fight the battles of the Civil War in his class, he did not have to worry about his relatives in Taiwan when he published stuff, he was not in any danger of being hauled in front of HUAC for his academic work. (He was a Fairbank student) There were benefits to the politicization of history (none of the grad students doing Ancient Greece got defense department money to do their language work,) but he was happy to see it go. I think he was happy with the change on a personal level and also on an intellectual one. 1949 happened. The Communists came to power. Nothing that was said now could undo that, and while attempts to use history as ammunition in American political battles were probably inevitable they were not a good thing for history. Actually, given the American political culture it was somewhat odd that “Who lost China” had such a long run in American politics.

On the other hand, while the passage of time helps to turn history into an academic subject, I don’t think it actually accomplishes anything in itself. With the passage of time more documents become available, and in many cases they become easier to search, but of course no new evidence is created. Eventually a secondary literature is created that helps you to figure out what you are looking at. None of this is necessary, however. Well, at least that was Sima Qian’s position. Sima was the Han dynasty historian who was castrated for his defense of a general whom the emperor had condemned. I’ve always assumed that this was in part because of factional situations at court, but it also grew out of Sima’s theories of history. He judged generals and ministers and emperors all the time and placed them in categories of good and bad. Like Ranke, Sima saw the historian as God, passing out judgments, and for Sima the standards you judged people against were eternal. Not only could historians judge the present, it was something they were ideally situated to do. This is not how we see historians today, of course, but Han Wudi was not disagreeing with Sima about the validity of praise and blame history. He agreed that standards were eternal, he agreed that judgment had to be made, but he disagreed with Sima about who got to be the judge. For him revisionist history was lesse majeste

So I suppose that if we are honest historians we have to stand up like Sima Qian and insist that historians alive today are just as good at writing the history of today and praising and blaming as the historians of 100 years hence will be able to.

Korea/Korea-China/Korea-Japan/Theory

Continent, Peninsula, Islands: notes on the theory of uneven and combined development and its possible application to northeast Asian history

Posted on by Owen / 3 Comments

A few weeks ago I attended the conference organised by Historical Materialism journal at SOAS on the theme ‘Towards a Cosmopolitan Marxism’. There was one session in particular that I wanted to attend: one of my favourite historians, Neil Davidson, discussing the theory of uneven and combined development with Colin Barker. The session didn’t disappoint. Neil Davidson’s paper looked at the intellectual history of the idea of uneven development going back to enlightenment thinkers such as Leibniz and tracing it through to its more developed form in the writings of Trotsky, such as his History of the Russian Revolution (although even here it is not really systematically developed as a theory). Here is the classic passage from the introduction to that book, quoted by Davidson:

The privilege of historic backwardness – and such a privilege exists – permits, or rather compels, the adoption of whatever is ready in advance of any specified date, skipping a whole series of intermediate stages.

And here is Trotsky’s passage on combined development:

From the universal law of unevenness thus derives another law which for want of a better name, we may call the law of combined development – by which we mean a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms.

Colin Barker on the other hand asked whether it might be possible to extend the theory in two directions: into the study of pre-capitalist history and beyond the national level to an understanding of global combined development. I won’t deal with the latter idea here, but the idea of the application to the history of pre-capitalist societies did give rise to some thoughts that I’d like to jot down here.
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China/English/Historiography/Intellectual/Song

Cheng-Zhu or Chengs v. Zhu?

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 3 Comments

I didn’t make a big thing of it in class, and nobody seems to have noticed the discrepancy, but there’s something of a disparity between my World History textbook (Brummet, et al., Civilization: Past and Present, 11e) and my own understanding of the development of Neo-Confucianism. Now that the semester’s (almost) over, I’d like to throw it open for comment.

My understanding, based in no small part on the new editions of the Columbia Sourcebooks, is that Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi were largely in agreement on the matter of li [principle] and qi [essence, force, energy, etc.], but that Cheng Yi emphasized qi as the most important consideration in personal development while Cheng Hao emphasized jen [humaneness] as the key to education and moral understanding. Zhu Xi, then, while a student of both brothers, was more a follower of Cheng Yi, focusing on the function of qi; thus the term Cheng-Zhu Confucianism.

Cheng Hao, on the other hand, was the progenitor of the Cheng-Lu strain, emphasizing, along with Lu Xiangshan, the unity of xin [mind, soul, heart, etc] with the Ultimate substrate of existence and the li principle. This is important particularly because it’s the foundation for the development of Wang Yangming thought, which was very influential in Japan.

Civilization, though, puts the Cheng brothers together as developers of li-qi theory, and claims that Zhu Xi “differed from the Chengs by ascribing greater importance to li over qi and by positing the existence of a Supreme Ultimate to which all li was connected.” (304)

Am I splitting hairs to see the textbook as oversimplifying to the point of error? How do you teach the Song Renaissance?

Art/Cultural/English/Film/Gender/General/Japan/大正/昭和

Because we must…

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 1 Comment

If it isn’t ninja, it’s geisha. Yes, the weekend following the 64th anniversary of Pearl Harbor is the perfect time for “spectacularly unfortunate metaphors about male eels and female caves and one regrettably brief catfight in a kimono.”

I admit, I didn’t read Memoirs of a Geisha when it came out, hit the bestseller lists, etc. I haven’t read it yet, but I know I should. Not just to nitpick at the book and movie (which I won’t see this weekend, though I might over break if opportunity presents), though that might indeed be fun, but because its popularity is something which we will have to take into account when we teach for the foreseeable future.

Anyway, the New York Times review from which the above quote is taken has a pretty good synopsis of the film and background, and pretty much comes to the conclusion that it’s a film that works visually much more than narratively. The job of a movie reviewer is twofold: explain what does and doesn’t work about the movie so you know if you want to see it; be entertaining. For both, it’s hard to beat Dargis’ concluding paragraphs:

Mr. Marshall can’t rescue the film from its embarrassing screenplay or its awkward Chinese-Japanese-Hollywood culture klatch, but “Memoirs of a Geisha” is one of those bad Hollywood films that by virtue of their production values nonetheless afford a few dividends, in this case, fabulous clothes and three eminently watchable female leads. Although it’s always a pleasure to see these three in action, and there’s something undeniably exciting about the prospect of them storming the big studio gate, the casting of Ms. Gong and Ms. Zhang ends up more bittersweet than triumphant. Ms. Zhang, for one, shows none of the heartache and steel of her astonishing performance in Wong Kar-wai’s “2046.” …

Ms. Gong’s hauteur and soaring cheekbones work better for her character, a woman of acid resolve. Although there are moments when Hatsumomo comes perilously close to Dragon Lady caricature (“I will destroy you!”), the actress’s talent and dignity keep the performance from sliding into full-blown camp. But even the formidable Ms. Gong cannot surmount the ruinous decision to have her and Ms. Zhang, along with the poorly used Mr. Yakusho, deliver their lines in vaguely British-sounding English that imparts an unnatural halting quality to much of their dialogue. The. Result. Is. That. Each. Word. Of. Dialogue. Sounds. As. If. It. Were. Punctuated. By. A. Full. Stop. Which. Robs. The. Language. Of. Its. Watery. Flow. And. Breath. Of. Real. Life. Even. As. It. Also. Gives. New. Meaning. To. The. Definition. Of. The. Period. Movie.

For slightly less breathless period pieces, Sour Duck has a review of a Taisho art exhibit (but missed the complementary Meiji works), which looks like fun, and runs almost until Christmas.

Cultural/General/Korea/Korean

Lee hang-bok’s Travel – 무술조천록(戊戌朝天錄)

Posted on by yuna / 1 Comment

이항복(李恒福 1556~1618)은 조선 중기의 인물로, 군사상, 정치상으로 상당히 활약을 했지만, 오히려 어린 시절의 그를 소재로 한 민담이 더 유명한 인물입니다. 이 자리를 빌어 학술적이라고 하긴 어렵지만 재미있는 이야기를 하나 소개해볼까 합니다.

임진왜란이 거의 끝나갈 즈음인 무술년(1598)에 정응태(丁應泰)의 무고 사건이 있었다. 일전 명나라의 찬획 정응태가 양호(楊鎬)를 탄핵했을 때, 조선은 그를 변호하는 글을 올려 양호를 유임시켰는데, 이 일로 유감을 품은 정응태는 조선을 무함하는 상주를 올렸던 것이다. 조선왕조실록(朝鮮王朝實錄)에 정응태가 올렸다는 상주문의 일부가 남아있다.

“조선에서는 대대로 일본인이 사는 집을 지어놓고, 여러 섬의 왜노(倭奴)를 불러다가 전쟁을 일으켜서 중국을 침범하여, 요하(遼河)의 동쪽을 빼앗아 옛땅을 찾으려고 한다.”

여기에서 말하는 일본인이 사는 집이란 일본 사신이나 상인들이 머무르는 왜관을 뜻하며, 옛땅이란 말은 원문에는 고토(古土)라 되어있다. 또 하나 문제가 된 것은 세종(世宗) 때의 신숙주(申叔舟)가 저술한 《해동제국기(海東諸國記)》였다. 일본이나 기타 나라들의 사정과 풍습을 기록한 일종의 지리지였는데, 일본 사신을 접대한 내용 역시 문제가 되었다. 이같은 정응태의 상주문은 당시 중국 내의 정치적 상황 때문이었지만, 아무튼 조선으로서는 곤란한 지경에 놓였고, 이에 사정을 해명하고 입장을 표명하기 위해 사신을 파견했다. 이 때 사신으로는 처음 유성룡이 내정되었다가 파직되었고, 이항복이 대신 사신으로 파견되었다. 이정구(李廷龜)와 황여일(黃汝一)이 동행했고, 정사(正使)는 이항복이었고, 부사(副使)는 이정구였다.

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General/Japan

Another Nail in the Ninja Coffin

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 3 Comments

In response to a query on the H-Japan list, samurai historian par excellance Karl Friday wrote:

There are basically no publications in English on ninja worth reading–it’s all junk. The only serious academic scholarship available outside Japanese language publications would be the material on Roy Ron’s website at ninpo.org. Roy is a (fairly) recent PhD graduate from U Hawaii, and has spent a number of years doing research on ninja and related topics.

The lack of reliable documents to work with makes ninja and ninjutsu a very difficult subject to research, and the ninja movie and novel phenomenon gives the whole topic a cartoonish aura that further dissuades academic historians from looking into it. Thus there isn’t much out there to read, other than what’s been written by modern teachers of “ninjutsu,” none of whom have an credentials as historians. In English, you’re simply out of luck; in Japanese there a few decent books and articles around, but for the most part information on ninja has to be culled in bits in snippets from studies on other topics.

The most reliable reconstructions of “ninja” history suggest that “ninja” denotes a function, not a special kind of warrior–ninja WERE samurai (a term, which didn’t designate a class until the Tokugawa period–AFTER the warfare of the late medieval period had ended–before that it designated only an occupation) performing “ninja” work.

Movie-style ninja, BTW, have a much longer history than the movies (although the term “ninja” does not appear to have been popularized until the 20th century). Ninja shows, ninja houses (sort of like American “haunted houses” at carnivals), and ninja novels and stories were popular by the middle of the Tokugawa period. The “ninja” performers may have created the genre completely out of whole cloth, or they may have built on genuine lore derived from old spymasters. Either way, however, it’s clear that much of the lore underlying both modern ninja movies and modern ninja schools has both a long history AND little basis in reality outside the theatre. [emphasis added; quoted with permission]

The site which Friday mentions above includes a history section which covers a lot of the same ground as Turnbull (though much more concisely) and some of the primary sources, most of which are either old gunki or 17th century martial manuals.

This pretty much puts an end to the remaining questions I had after reading Turnbull’s book. I used to tell students that the question of ninja was, from a historian’s standpoint, still somewhat open. I think I’m going to take a much stronger line from now on, and point out that there are no historically credible claims supporting the historicity of a tradition which somehow concludes with modern schools of ninjustsu. So, we’re back to the problem of created modern traditions in the martial arts and their discursive meanings.

Update: Peter Shapinsky’s comment about the users of violence and the relative flexibility of the term samurai are also interesting.

English/General/Korea

Asian History Carnival 2

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 0 Comment

The 2nd installment of the Asian History Carnival is coming next week, December 12th. The announcement is out a bit late but send your nominations to konrad [at] lawson.net. I’ll be hosting the carnival at my own Muninn.net

See the full details on submission in the official announcement. If you missed the first carnival, take a look here. Also, pass on the word! Unlike the excellent bi-weekly History Carnival, our own bi-monthly carnival is just getting off the ground! I hope Frog in a Well readers will take a moment to make a nomination or two of good Asian history related postings by midnight December 11th EST.

UPDATE: The new Asian history carnival is now up over at Muninn. The next carnival will be February 2nd, 2006. Please contact me at konrad [at] lawson.net if you are interested in hosting the third installment of the Asian History Carnival.

Current/Recent Events/English/Historiography/Japan/Law/Nationalism/War/昭和

Revision and Revisionism

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

Deep in the middle of a roundtable about constitutional revision and neo-nationalism in Japan, comes a bit of discussion of historical revision and popular beliefs

John Junkerman: Returning to the Nanking issue, we were at a bookstore the other night, filming there. They have huge stacks of a new book by Higashinakano Shudo, who’s one of the key and very prolific Nanjing massacre deniers. His new book, which argues that a Guardian correspondent named Harold Timperley, who was responsible for many of the reports to the West of the massacre and wrote a book called What War Means, was on the payroll of the KMT and therefore he was writing propaganda. This is based on a fundamental historical error. Timperley was apparently hired by the KMT to write foreign press releases and such in 1939, but he wrote his book in 1938, before he was on the payroll. But that doesn’t really matter to Higashinakano. The point is that there were stacks of these books laid out flat at the end of the aisle with a big display, “the latest book by Higashinakano.” One of his other books has sold 80,000 copies. Another example of rising chauvinism is the recent Hate Korea manga that has sold 650,000 copies.

David McNeill: That to me is much more dangerous than academic books. I know that academic books have an influence, as well. We went on holiday last year, my wife and I, with her son who’s 21, and he’s a smart kid and his mother’s a progressive and his grandfather’s one of the most famous activists in Japan, so he has every reason to have a different take on the way things work in this country. But all of his attitudes and beliefs were pro-Koizumi. “Why should he not visit Yasukuni? The Nanking Massacre has been exaggerated, it was not a massacre. There were no comfort women.” All of it. Somehow he got all of these ideas, and he didn’t get them from school. Because, if you read the students’ essays, they say over and over again, “Well, actually, we don’t remember covering the war issues.” They spend so much time covering the long glorious history of Japan, for 2000 years that they often don’t have a lot of time to cover the war. So they get it from popular culture, they get it from manga, they get it from TV.

The core of the discussion is about Article 9 revision and the relationship between that, the Fundamental Education Law revision and the creation of a very restrictive constitutional amendment process (the outlines are in the Constitution itself, but concrete procedures have never been laid out in law). Junkerman sums it up pretty well here (emphasis added)

It depends in part on how the referendum law shapes up. The original versions of it were quite draconian, very restrictive/ But even the modified version, if it goes through, would prevent showing my film in Japan, for example. Public employees and teachers won’t be allowed to speak about the proposed revision, the media will be expected to observe self-restraint, all sorts of restrictions, which could create an environment in which people would be unable to discuss it in any substantial way. They will also be looking for the right, strategic moment. There is fundamental support for Article 9, but it’s very mushy and weak. If there were to be another incursion from a North Korean boat, or if there was a clash with Chinese forces over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, , that support would crumble overnight. Then they’ve got their referendum law, they take the revision to the Diet, you’ve got 60 or 90 days to hold the referendum, and the constitution gets revised in the heat of the moment.

I’m not sure how I feel about the Weimar comparison which comes shortly thereafter: I think there’s some more elements of comparison which could be made, but it’s too offhand to be a really serious historical analogy at this point. I don’t know why they don’t make the analogy to Japan of the 1920s instead: internationalist, democratic, cosmopolitan, but also Imperial, nationalistic, anti-Leftist, and politically adrift. Then you don’t need to posit a Great Depression — when the Japanese economy seems stronger than it’s been in fifteen years — to argue that things could easily go in the wrong direction (the Depression did contribute to the sense of crisis in Japan, but not to the mass mobilization the way it did in Germany).

The article ends with a statement of appeal from the “Article Nine Association,” signed by Nobel Laureate Oe Kenzaburo, “New Left” novelist Oda Makoto, literary critic Kato Shuichi and philosopher Tsurumi Shunsuke, among other luminaries. It’s an interesting ongoing discussion, but it’s very important to separate out the tendentious past, partial present and speculative future in this argument….

China/English/General

Asian History Carnival 2

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 0 Comment

The 2nd installment of the Asian History Carnival is coming next week, December 12th. The announcement is out a bit late but send your nominations to konrad [at] lawson.net. I’ll be hosting the carnival at my own Muninn.net

See the full details on submission in the official announcement. If you missed the first carnival, take a look here. Also, pass on the word! Unlike the excellent bi-weekly History Carnival, our own bi-monthly carnival is just getting off the ground! I hope Frog in a Well readers will take a moment to make a nomination or two of good Asian history related postings by midnight December 11th EST.

UPDATE: The new Asian history carnival is now up over at Muninn. The next carnival will be February 2nd, 2006. Please contact me at konrad [at] lawson.net if you are interested in hosting the third installment of the Asian History Carnival.

Blog Carnival

Asian History Carnival 2

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 0 Comment

The 2nd installment of the Asian History Carnival is coming next week, December 12th. The announcement is out a bit late but send your nominations to konrad [at] lawson.net. I’ll be hosting the carnival at my own Muninn.net

See the full details on submission in the official announcement. If you missed the first carnival, take a look here. Also, pass on the word! Unlike the excellent bi-weekly History Carnival, our own bi-monthly carnival is just getting off the ground! I hope Frog in a Well readers will take a moment to make a nomination or two of good Asian history related postings by midnight December 11th EST.

UPDATE: The new Asian history carnival is now up over at Muninn. The next carnival will be February 2nd, 2006. Please contact me at konrad [at] lawson.net if you are interested in hosting the third installment of the Asian History Carnival.

China/General/Hong Kong

Provincialism and democracy

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 3 Comments

Everyone is talking about the protests in Hong Kong, for good reason. What I find most interesting is the official response. (All links via Simon’s World, the one-stop shop for China stuff.) Xinhua’s take was almost comical, pointing out that bus routes were disrupted and giving no idea what the protests were actually about. Much more interestingly, Donald Tsang, the Beijing-appointed Chief Executive seems to be making noises about democracy.

“I am 60 years of age. I certainly want to see universal suffrage taking place in Hong Kong in my time,” Mr Tsang said.

I find his remarks interesting because I wonder what they say about center-local relationships and the relationship of democracy to power in China. He could of course just be throwing a sop to the protesters, but it is more interesting to wonder if he is telling the truth, that is that he wants an expansion of democracy. As is pretty well-known, the Chinese central government has been claiming that China will eventually become democratic, and elections, if often problematic ones, are held at the local level. The central government likes this because it makes it harder for low-level party bureaucrats to entrench themselves in power and it helps to re-constitute order in a place At the very least they favor a bit of democracy for instrumental reasons.

On local democracy in China see Susan Ogden Inklings of Democracy in China

More interestingly, I assume at some point these local leaders are going to take advantage of the greater legitimacy democratic elections give them to defy the center. That is basically what happened in 1911, provincial assemblies that claimed to “represent” “the people” (it’s really complicated) took their provinces out of the empire. The provincial assemblies had considerably more legitimacy and influence than the central government, and for that reason, among others, the revolution was relatively quick and bloodless.

That the center and the provinces bicker a lot today is not news, although it takes a serious Zhongnanhai-ologist to know what is actually going on. Adding democracy into the mix seems to be almost inevitable, and very bad for the center. Eventually Hong Kong will have its first freely elected Executive, and this will potentially give him a lot of power in relation to the Beijing. I think that is why the center is so nervous about this. If you look at the structure they are talking about it seems that even a freely elected Executive would be pretty constrained in a formal sense. Hong Kongers seem to generally buy the government line that order and national power are more important than individual liberties, and my guess is that anyone who was elected would be pretty agreeable to much of what Beijing wants. Hong Kong is not France, or even the U.S. Still, once you let democracy jump to the provincial level its hard to see how it can be contained, other than by more democracy. I think the most encouraging thing about the demonstration is that Beijing really is afraid, and they have good reason to be.

Books and Articles/English/Intellectual

Takeuchi Yoshimi on E. H. Norman

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 4 Comments

It is a fairly rare thing to see Japanese public intellectuals pour praise on the work of historians of Japan who are active outside of Japan. It is heartening, however, to occasionally find examples of this and be reminded that our worlds of writing are not completely separate. Some examples from my recent reading that come to mind are when Kang Sangjun praises and makes use of my advisor, Andrew Gordon‘s conception of “Imperial Democracy” in his essay on “Radical Democracy” or a few articles I have read recently that build on ideas from Carol Gluck’s many essays. Of course, Gordon and Gluck have many of their works translated into Japanese or write actively for Japanese publications.

Even more rare, I think is when such a historian of Japan’s work is referred to as a, “work of art.” Today I found a particularly early example of this kind of attention in Takeuchi Yoshimi’s 1948 essay “What is Modernity” (translated by Richard Calichman, who also has a forthcoming work on Takeuchi that I’m looking forward to entitled Takeuchi Yoshimi: Displacing the West) The context of the quote is a discussion by Takeuchi of Lu Xun’s parable of the wise man, the fool, and the slave, and about what Takeuchi believes to be the unique connection between the claims to the “superiority” of Japanese culture and its “slave mentality.” He finds echoes of this in the Marxist scholarship of E. H. Norman:

The following words are found in Norman’s Soldier and Peasant in Japan. Of the books I’ve read recently, this one made a particularly deep impression, striking me as virtually a work of art. It hits home through the weight of its content. The text possesses a formative logic, with the wealth of its resources rising up like a Rodin sculpture. It is classically beautiful in its abundance of life force. Toward the end of the book, when the militarists become the tool of capital (which lagged behind European capital) and set off for the mainland invasion, the inevitable process of barbarization on the part of the modern army is captured in precise psychological realism: “The common Japanese man, himself an unfree agent enrolled in a conscript army, became an unwitting agent in riveting the shackles of slavery on other peoples.” After this Normand adds, “It is impossible to employ genuinely free men for enslaving others; and conversely, the most brutalized and shameless slaves make the most pitiless and effective despoilers of the liberties of others.” (80)

Current/Recent Events/English/Japan/Korea-Japan/Politics/大正/明治

Semantics and History: Did Japan “Invade” Korea?

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

Well, the obvious answer to that question is yes, but that’s not the invasion we’re talking about. Over on the Korea side, there’s a lively discussion on the case of the Japanese teacher disciplined for making her class apologize to South Korea with regard to a Tokyo councilman’s statement that “Japan never invaded Korea.” Here’s a portion of the comment I made:

On the substantive question, I have something of a mixed feeling. In a technical sense, I don’t think you can really point to any of Japan’s actions against Korea as an “invasion” in the sense of a mass military operation. That doesn’t mean that Korea wasn’t dominated militarily, that Japan didn’t use force when necessary to protect and expand its control, that colonial occupation wasn’t brutal and damaging. It does mean that we need to carefully educate our students about the “soft” (formal and informal) processes of colonial domination and control, and the realities of subaltern experience. It’s a “distinction without a difference” and while the statement may (and I’m open to disagreement, really) be technically correct, it is still objectionable because the intent of the statement clearly is to make the occupation of Korea a “blameless” non-violent process, which is a distortion of the truth.

This could be, I suppose, a useful teaching moment…. I’ll have to bring it up in my 20th century Japan course and see how my students respond. In the meantime, come on over and join the discussion. If you want some more background on the history, I recommend Konrad Lawson’s comparative historiography for starters.

[crossposted to Cliopatria]

Colonial/Korea/Korea-Japan/Nationalism/Textbooks

Japanese teacher disciplined for opposing nationalist textbooks

Posted on by Owen / 31 Comments

I wonder whether anyone else has seen this article from the Christian Science Monitor, which I picked up via the Marmot’s Hole and Far Outliers. It concerns the story of a teacher in Tokyo who has been disciplined for attacking the view that “Japan never invaded Korea.”

[W]hen a Tokyo city councilman in an official meeting said “Japan never invaded Korea,” her history class sent an apology to Korean President Roh Moo-hyan – an action that sparked her removal from her classroom.

[…]

Masuda, who says her two sons have Korean friends, got censured after her class did a study group on Japan’s occupation of Korea. Her social studies class wrote a letter of apology to Roh, and sent it to the Korean Embassy in Toyko. In a cover letter, Masuda said that councilman Koga Toshiaki’s remarks were “a disgrace” by objective historical standards, but “regrettably [they] can be presented proudly as a triumph in the assembly of Tokyo, the capital of this country.”

The class never heard from the Korean consul. But Masuda did hear from the Tokyo Board of Education. Her letter was discovered by a Yasukuni shrine support group and they complained to city officials. Masuda was told that while Mr. Koga did speak in public, it was “inappropriate” for Masuda to repeat his name in a letter that was not private, and a violation of city employee codes.

Masuda is now ordered to spend her days in a small room studying public servant regulations, a serious humiliation she says. She in turn is trying to fight in court.

I wonder if there is any sort of support campaign for Ms Masuda, or if there is an e-mail address where those of us who want to can send messages of support.

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