Today we are launching our new collaborative Korean history weblog. You can read more about the goals of the site here.
I’m going to start it out with a series of postings this week on early Western perceptions of Koreans in the late 19th century and colonial period. I’ll later post a summary of some of the work out there on Japanese perceptions of Korea during the same period for comparison.
Today we are launching our new collaborative Korean history weblog. You can read more about the goals of the site here.
I’m going to start it out with a series of postings this week on early Western perceptions of Koreans in the late 19th century and colonial period. I’ll later post a summary of some of the work out there on Japanese perceptions of Korea during the same period for comparison.
Since a lot of postings will discuss Japanese imperialism and colonial Korea, there may be some cross-posting. Since we won’t cross-post everything however, you might want to pay the Korean history weblog a visit on occasion.
I’d like to introduce myself. I teach in the East Asian Studies Department at the University of Arizona and specialize in Japan. I lived in Japan from 1987 until 2002. I’ve published 6 books, and I’m now working on my seventh. I was trained as an anthropologist, and my research interests range from nationalism, education, gender, consumerist culture, to religion.
I’m now interested in cross-national and changing conceptions of “property,” particularly as it relates to political economy, definitions of personhood, and “self-appearance.”
I very much look forward to hearing about the views of others.
Yours,
Brian J. McVeigh
Google print, which is scanning thousands of books in major research libraries, is useful when you want to scan across many English language books for terms. It only offers you a few pages, but will show you all the hits for words in given books, the pages they are on, and what pages surround them. Many books are not yet available, and you will find that some important books on East Asian history, both old and new are frustratingly missing will less common works are there. However, instead of going to the index of books you own, if it is on Google Print we have an increasingly quick alternative to consulting indexes.
For example, didn’t Poshek Fu’s book on collaboration in wartime Shanghai mention an organization called the Shanghai Association of the Theatrical Circle for National Salvation? Ah yes, Google Print tells me that it is mentioned on page 74, and in a footnote on page 188. I can then login to my google account and view that page, and in many cases a few pages surrounding it.
You can also completely search the contents of a work by of our own Alan Baumler, the leading contributor here at Frog in a Well – China. His Modern China and Opium: A Reader is already scanned up by Google through the University of Michigan’s library.
Now, most of us know that Google has been scanning lots of books no longer protected under copyright. Thanks to this announcement, it is easier for me to get at them.
Go to Google Print and search for China related books, for example, with this search term:
china date:1500-1923
You can also use other search elements to limit by author for example (eg. author:smith) or title (eg. intitle:language).
This could develop into a very useful searching tool for us in the future, since every page of these public domain books can be searched and viewed through google.
Update: See more interesting examples of old google print text searching over at Cliopatria.
Google print, which is scanning thousands of books in major research libraries, is useful when you want to scan across many English language books for terms. It only offers you a few pages, but will show you all the hits for words in given books, the pages they are on, and what pages surround them. Many books are not yet available, and you will find that some important books on East Asian history, both old and new are frustratingly missing will less common works are there. However, instead of going to the index of books you own, if it is on Google Print we have an increasingly quick alternative to consulting indexes.
For example, didn’t Sheldon Garon’s book Molding Japanese Minds mention that incident with Peru and the Maria Luz? Ah yes, searching with “sheldon garon maria luz” Google Print tells me that it is mentioned on page 91, and in a footnote on page 305. I can then login to my google account and view that page, and in many cases a few pages surrounding it.
Now, most of us know that Google has been scanning lots of books no longer protected under copyright. Thanks to this announcement, it is easier for me to get at them.
Go to Google Print and search for Japan related books, for example, with this search term:
japan date:1500-1923
You can also use other search elements to limit by author for example (eg. author:smith) or title (eg. intitle:language).
This could develop into a very useful searching tool for us in the future, since every page of these public domain books can be searched and viewed through google.
Update: See more interesting examples of old google print text searching over at Cliopatria.
What did visitors to late Chosŏn and colonial Korea have to say about the people and society they found there? When seen through the lens of imperialism and all of the racist or essentializing habits of that period, what might we recognize in the language and generalizations of our own time?
There is a vast and growing academic literature looking at these cross-cultural encounters, and at the many recorded descriptions and analyses of distant peoples to be found in the form of travel writings, diaries, and the anthropologist’s ethnography. From this scholars are finding new and exciting ways to understand the way that empire is justified and maintained but also explore better confront the perils of describing that which is foreign to us.
In the case of primary works related to Korea we can find the Western visitor judging their host culture by the concepts of race, religion, and enlightenment civilization that they bring with them, but anyone reading their writing cannot help but note the heavy presence of Japan and indeed a kind of “Japanese filter” in much of writing from this period. Long before annexation in 1910 or the establishment of the protectorate in 1905, Japan was effective in convincing many Western visitors to Korea of its noble and civilizing intentions, if they occasionally failed to impress them with their attempts to force reforms on King Kojong’s court.
In a series of postings here at Frog in a Well, I’m going to share some passages from contemporary travel accounts which capture some of views about Koreans held by visitors in Korea which appear frequently in the writings I have looked over for this little project.
Continue reading →
Google print, which is scanning thousands of books in major research libraries, is useful when you want to scan across many English language books for terms. It only offers you a few pages, but will show you all the hits for words in given books, the pages they are on, and what pages surround them. Many books are not yet available, and you will find that some important books on East Asian history, both old and new are frustratingly missing will less common works are there. However, instead of going to the index of books you own, if it is on Google Print we have an increasingly quick alternative to consulting indexes.
For example, didn’t Wayne Patterson’s first book on Korean immigration to Hawaii talk quite a bit about Yun Ch’i Ho’s visit to Hawaii and his inspection of life and labor conditions on the sugar plantations? Ah yes, after searching with “wayne patterson korean immigration” and then choosing his first book, I searched for “Yun Ch’i Ho” within the book and Google Print returns about 35 page references. I can then login to my google account and view some of these pages.
Now, most of us know that Google has also been scanning lots of books no longer protected under copyright. Thanks to this announcement, it is easier for me to get at them.
Go to Google Print and search for Japan related books, for example, with this search term:
korea date:1500-1923
You might also want to try “corea” and you can also use other search elements to limit by author for example (eg. author:smith) or title (eg. intitle:language).
This could develop into a very useful searching tool for us in the future, since every page of these public domain books can be searched and viewed through google.
Update: See more interesting examples of old google print text searching over at Cliopatria.
I’m very grateful to Konrad for including me in this project. I’ve really enjoyed blogging in the Japan and China Frogs and I’m looking forward to this one as well. These are really ambitious projects, extending academic blogging into East Asian History, and vice versa, in what I hope will be very productive ways. These blogs have the potential to not just supplement our communications within our disciplines, but to bring new audiences and to challenge our conventional historiographical boundaries. For an example, check out the Korean-Japanese topics from the Japan blog.
This is what really interests me about being part of the Korean and Chinese blogs. I’m a Japanese historian by trade and training, but I’ve become increasingly dissatisfied, intellectually and pedagogically, with the conventional “national history” tropes. I’m particularly interested in greater integration of Korean and Japanese histories. It’s not just the frequent points of intersection and conflict (premodern migration, Paekche/Yamato cultural influences, Mongol Invasions, Hideyoshi Wars, colonial era; trade throughout history) but also their very different cultural trajectories. They faced some very similar challenges (Chinese empires, Mongols, the modern West; local/central authority, warrior traditions) and ideas (Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, imperialism) and almost invariably their paths diverge. I think studying those “choice points” in comparison rather than in the relative isolation of national historiography would be extremely fruitful.
My dream (i.e. a project to be taken up after tenure) is to produce a balanced and integrated Korean-Japanese history. One that’s not too China-heavy but rather takes China as a given that both societies interact with in different ways at different times. I’ve got a long way to go on this project. I already have started teaching the two countries together in my World History surveys. I’m taking a big step next semester: I’m teaching an undergraduate seminar on Korean History through Primary Sources which is the first step towards developing a stand-alone Korean history survey (if there’s sufficient student interest, which I doubt in the short term, I’d probably expand this to two semesters; I’ve expanded the China and Japan surveys to three semesters each). This will force me to work through the materials, gain facility with the history. I’ve taught Korean history before, as part of East Asian surveys, but never in this kind of depth. It’ll be a challenge, but I’m really looking forward to it.
I’m sure a great deal of my posting here will be in the form of questions and confusions. I hope that putting my ignorance on display (and, as Konrad notes below, the very name of the site evokes the limits of our knowledge) will not only draw in those who know more than I, but also embolden others to extend their teaching and learning into new directions.
My name is Konrad Mitchell Lawson. I am in my second year of a PhD in history. My research interests relate to treason, traitors, and the aftermath of war in modern East Asia. I’m also very interested in issues of historiography, colonialism, and nationalism.
Before returning to history as a PhD student, I completed a masters degree in International Affairs and continued what was then primarily an interest in the history of Sino-Japanese relations as a research student in Tokyo for a year and a half. I have also spent a few years studying languages in China, Japan, and Korea. I have recently become much more interested in Korea and expect its history to become an increasingly central part of my graduate studies and future career.
I will be posting in English but feel free to comment in Korean or English. Though my Korean is still very poor, I welcome the challenge to my reading skills! For those who want to read more, you can visit my personal weblog here where I have had occasion to write about Korean history from time to time, mixed in with postings on Japan, China, and Norway. Finally, I am the host and administrator of Frog In a Well and welcome your comments on how to improve our project in the future.
I recently learned [29 October 2005 show, round 3] that I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, recently indicted for his role in, at the very least, the coverup of the Valerie Plame Wilson leak, is a published author. Why should I care, I hear you ask? Because his book, The Apprentice is about a dramatic encounter in 1903 Japan. (You can view the book at Amazon, as well as decidedly mixed reader reviews)
The Apprentice takes place in a remote mountain inn in northernmost Japan, where a raging blizzard has brought together wayfarers who share only fear and suspicion of one another. It is the winter of 1903, the country is beset with smallpox and war is brewing with Russia.
In the flickering shadows of the crowded room, the apprentice, charged with running the inn during the owner’s absence, finds himself strongly attracted to one of the performers lodged there. His involvement with the mysterious travelers plunges him headlong into murder, passion and heart-stopping chases through the snow.
Several of the news stories which mention the book say that it got “favorable reviews” but, on the erotic bits at least, the New Yorker (which was probably the source for the Wait, Wait questions) disagrees. I can’t find any reviews which seem to be written from a good Japanese historical or literary background. Libby worked for the State Department’s East Asia desk in the early-mid 1980s, which seems to be where he got his interest in Japanese history as a backdrop for his writing.
My university library system does not, alas, have a copy, but my state public library does. I’ve put in a request, so I might be able to answer my own questions shortly. But if anyone out there who knows the period has already read it, I’d be happy to hear from them first.
I have uploaded a new index page for us here at Frog in a Well. It displays our new Frog in a Well logo, based on a painting by Joseph Y. Lo, who has kindly given us permission to use a modified version of it throughout the website.
In addition, I have prepared two buttons that you are free to use when linking to us:
Additionally, stay tuned as we will soon be launching the Korean history blog here!
I have uploaded a new index page for us here at Frog in a Well. It displays our new Frog in a Well logo, based on a painting by Joseph Y. Lo, who has kindly given us permission to use a modified version of it throughout the website.
In addition, I have prepared two buttons that you are free to use when linking to us:
Additionally, stay tuned as we will soon be launching the Korean history blog here!
I don’t think anyone else here has posted this before, but Japan’s National History Museum has a fantastic website. [via Sharon Howard via BilbiOdyssey]
Some of the images need better labelling, particularly the samples in the permanent exhibition pages, but if you know what you’re looking at, it’s great stuff.
I recently got a postcard asking me to assign a pamphlet “Li Fengjin: How the New Marriage Law Helped Chinese Women Stand Up” translated by Susan Glosser and published by Opal Mogus Books. Somehow this postcard managed to beat the odds, and I actually looked at it on its quick trip to the circular file. The book is cheap (only $5.95) and students may actually read it, so I will probably end up using it next time I teach Modern China.
There are lots of interesting things in it. The story is about Li Fengjin, a woman who is trapped in an arranged marriage with a brutal husband and, eventually, manages to get out of it with the help of the 1950 Marriage Law, the text of which is attached. As always, the most interesting parts are those that don’t entirely manage to shake off the old ways. At one point when she has fled her husband’s house she meets up with a man Gu Shujin, and eventually ends up “shacking up” with him. The word ‘love’ is never used in connection with this relationship. This is something that always causes my students problems. Some of them watched Red Sorghum and they were mystified by the central relationship, since the woman and the man never showed the slightest interest in each other. My explanation was that a love relationship is a good modern thing, but too much interest in the other makes the woman a slut and the man a rake. So you fall in love, and everyone knows you are in love because you never give any sign of it. You are acting modern by rejecting the old feudal relationship of marriage but you need to preserve the proprieties or else you fall into another feudal relationship based on lust. So liberation and what we would call prudishness go hand in hand.
On the other hand, in the panel above Li Fengjin is standing in the doorway in what both Glosser and I see as a very provocative pose, as if the authors were trying to show that sexual desire could be acceptable in some contexts.
The Party does not come out all that well in this. One of the things about all of this immediate post-49 stuff is that it is aimed at much at lower level party members as at the masses. Li Fengjin asks the township chief for a divorce, but he turns her down since she can’t repay the 20 dan of rice her family got for her. The Chief is presented as a good person (peasant) who does not yet understand the party line. Actually, even his initial position of allowing a divorce after compensation is pretty revolutionary After a brief public self-criticism he comes around. This is sort of a stock character in these sorts of stories, the person who is on the road to revolution but has not gotten there yet. Revolution as a process that everyone is going through, rather than something imposed from above.
Frankly even at the top the Party is not quite revolutionized. At the very end Gu Shujin informs his new wife that they need to work hard at production and supporting the front to “return the government’s benevolence”, possibly the most traditionally way to express the relationship between the state and the people that I can think of.
Opal Mogus does not google, but you can e-mail them at opalmogusbooks at yahoo
The Great Yuan—how grave and dignified,
Its authority by the crafty and duplicitous monopolized.
‘Repairing’ the Yellow River dikes [1351], ‘reforming’ the
paper currency [1350],
These calamities set off the Red Turbans by the host.
Too many laws, punishments too harsh—that’s incited
the people’s wrath.
People eating people, cheap money buying out dear—
Nothing like this seen in former years.
Bandits in office, officials in gangs; Alas! What a pity,
Muddling together the worthy and the dumb.
Tao Zhongyi recorded this poem in the 1350s and claimed that it was popular with “folks from the capital all the way to Jiangnan.” I am always suspicious of sources like this. There was a long tradition, supposedly going all the way back to the Book of Songs and definitely going as far back as the Han, of elites collecting folk songs as a way of judging the popular mood. As a historian you have to question what “folks” means here. Are these really songs sung by commoners? On the other hand you have to appreciate that members of the elite find it appropriate to try and speak with the voice of the common people.
The thing that really struck me about this one was the fairly clear statement of Gresham’s Law in the fourth line from the end. Actually, a bit of googling quickly showed that Gresham’s law (Bad money drives out good) is older in the West than I had thought. More interestingly, this does not really seem to be Gresham’s Law, or at least it was not understood that way by the Chinese authors who wrote about it. According to wikipedia Gresham applies when two forms of money are available, one (bad money) with a larger spread between the face value and the commodity value. This was not how Chinese economic thinkers looked at it, however. According to von Glahn Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000-1700 California U.P. 1996 Chinese monetary theory usually assumed that “the purchasing power of the medium of exchange was solely a result of its quantity, in the form of money, in relationship to the supply of all other commodities.”(p.33) That paper money had no intrinsic value was not a problem, since Chinese money was usually seen as fiat. This explains why the Chinese started using paper money so much earlier than anyone else.
There were strains of metalism, the idea that the value of money was based on the metal in it, in Chinese thought, and apparently especially among the commoners. Keeping the volume of money appropriate and making paper convertible to coin were the mainstays of policy when the paper currency was functioning well. I get the impression that convertibility was seen as more of a sop to the commoners, who favored coin as a better store of value, a use of money that the state was not as concerned with. So yes, the currency was collapsing, and yes the quote seems to be Gresham’s Law, but the understanding of money is completely different.
I’m probably misunderstanding something here, of course.
Poem from Paul Jakov Smith “Impressions of the Song-Yuan-Ming Transition” in Smith and von Glahn The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History Harvard U.P. 2003