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
In an argument about Japanese-American draft-resistor internees during WWII, Eric Muller wrote
in my book I argue that vocal and visible protest of government orders are more distinctive facets of American popular culture than of Japanese popular culture. (I do not suggest that protest is absent from Japanese tradition, or that compliance is absent from American tradition; I simply maintain that as a comparative matter, vocal public protest has a stronger American lineage than Japanese.)
Do you [ed.: Ken Masugi] see this as true?
If you think it false, would you share with us prominent examples of the protest tradition in Japanese culture that match the Boston Tea Party, “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death,” the National Woman’s Party, lunch counter protests and civil rights sit-ins, the Stonewall riots, the Wounded Knee protest, etc. etc. etc.
To be honest, I’m on Eric Muller’s side of this debate, but this passage rankled somewhat. Perhaps it’s my background in social history, my early exposure to Mikiso Hane (even before I found out that my wife knew him) or just my contrarian, blogger-nature, but I can’t just let it stand.
First, there’s the comparative history aspect: I can’t think of any other national history that has such a distinguished tradition of civil political protest: perhaps the English? The French get too revolutionary too easily. Ghandian India, or pre-1990 South Africa perhaps? In the last twenty years or so, the ubiquity of marches and demonstrations has taken some of the edge off, though if you limit the field to “events critiquing one’s own rulers” then you’ve a much smaller data set. Whether it rises to the level of a “tradition” in that exceptionalist American self-congratulatory sense is another question: I’m not sure that Muller’s list couldn’t be dismissed as “prominent examples” in contrast to a fairly conservative and gradualist tradition only recently challenged by strong civil rights movements.
There are, as Muller concedes “prominent examples of dissent in Japanese history.” Some would argue that there’s more than that: from the peasant uprisings of the Tokugawa era to the rice riots of 1919, demo against the Security Treaty, the lawsuits of Minamata, individual acts of self-destruction, literary and cultural satire, and speaker trucks, I think that there is a reasonably strong strain of public self-criticism and scolding, particularly given an environment of repression which (at most times in the last century and a half) goes well beyond that which has existed in the US, even during its colonial era.
What do you think?
Non Sequitur: Sumo Wrestlers in New York [registration required]. Wait, actually, it’s S.U.M.O., and the organizers swear it’s unscripted….
Interesting article on the problem understanding Central Asia: the first problem is that nobody agrees on what or where it is. Apparently, East Asianists — China scholars, mostly — are a big part of the problem. Funny, though, since that’s where most of the actual research seems to come from. Yes, it’s a distorted historiography, as most “influence” oriented scholarship tends to be. But almost all non-Western societies start out being studied in relation to better known regions: it’s a hallmark of the early stages of a field, and it’s something that will, if the article’s comments about the rising tide of scholars from Central Asia are sound, be rectified in the next generation, as these things are.
Amusing non sequitur: An entire blog devoted to exposing badly used Chinese characters in the West, particularly in tatoos. [via]
One of the nice things about teaching modern China is that the Communists, as a text-centered party, wrote a lot of things. A lot of them have been translated into English which makes them easy to give to students. One of the things our department is currently doing is compiling a database of historical images that people can use while teaching. I have always used a lot of images while teaching (helps to keep them awake) and one of the things I find interesting about this is that lots of the images are pretty much useless if you are teaching at various different levels. For example, Kahn’s Monarchy in the Emperor’s eyes has a series of pictures of the Qianlong emperor in all of his various roles (warrior, Buddhist, martial-arts hero etc.) which work well in a class where you are talking about the Qing monarchy in a fairly fine-grained sort of way. They are not that useful for an East Asian survey, and even less useful for our gen ed. class. On the other hand, the easily google-able image of Chinese junks being blown up in the Opium War works well in the gen-ed class but is not really useful in a China class to make any point beyond “China lost the war.” (In general I like to use images that actually say something. Putting Zhang Zhidong’s portrait up on the wall does not accomplish much.) The bits and pieces of history that are easiest to find and use are those that serve a lot of purposes.
Mao and his texts are the best example of this. There is the Little Red Book. The Chinese Communist party of published his Selected Works. V. 1-5. Apparently a group of Indian Maoists collected another four volumes of Mao’s other works that were not part of the official cannon. So you have Red Book stuff that is quite cryptic to anyone who has not immersed themselves in Maoism, which works well if you have gotten yourself and your students to that point. Then there are the Selected Works things, which tend to be broader and more accessible. The additional volumes have a bunch of stuff that is by Mao, but really more May 4th than Maoist, as well as a lot of later speeches that would work well for fairly detailed work on post-49 China.
All of this Mao stuff was put on-line by the Communist party of Peru in 1999. Alas, some time in 2004 the site went down, and all of my syllabus links died. Thanks to the wayback machine, however, it is still possible to find all this stuff (along with the works of Chairman Gonzolo of the PCP.)
Welcome to the first Asian History Carnival! The deadline for submissions was 10/10, which just happened, this year, to fall on the holiday of Columbus Day (observed in Hawai’i as “Discover’s Day“). Columbus, as we all know, never made it to Asia, in no small part because he was relying on the geographically unsound writings of Marco Polo. In honor of this conjunction, I’ve composed a haiku, and because this is a blog carnival, there are links:
In honor of the tradition of Marco Polo, we will take our virtual journey from West to East. And we won’t be terribly picky about geography. Since this is the first AHC, I’m also going to take considerable liberties to introduce certain particularly good Asian history bloggers (who might host future editions?).
Middle East
Our first stop is a 3rd century Syrian …. what? (it’s a quiz, I don’t want to ruin the surprise)
Central Asia
The honor of the first submission to the first AHC went to J. Otto Pohl, proprietor of the Carnival of Diasporas, with his History of Cotton in Uzbekistan.
Subcontinent
Sepoy is one of my favorite bloggers, so it’s hard for me to pick from his œuvre. There’s the posts on drugs and games, Madrasas and Pehlwani, rebel warriors and, my personal favorites, on language. His facility for erudite procrastination makes him one of my favorite writers.
Southeast
http://www.2bangkok.com/ is running a series of historic photos of Bangkok, like this collection of 1920s images from a Japanese documentary.
China
Alan Baumler has a great facility with images and with complicated historical and cultural issues.
Natalie Bennett did a very nice review of the Chinese women’s language Nushu, much easier reading than most of the academic treatments I’ve fallen asleep over.
Andrew Meyer, who has one of the coolest blog names I know, attempted meta-history, which got a little conversation going. He didn’t go quite as deep as to deny the existence of China, but it was still interesting.
The Angry Chinese Blogger seems to focus on controversies, like the lawsuit regarding the hundred-head race, textbooks and the degradation of the Great Wall in the face of development.
Korea
Owen Miller writes quite a bit on Korean history: for his “best foot forward” he offered to share his old book collection, in this case mid-20c Korean materials with fascinating histories. Miller also recommended Antti Leppanen’s Finnish language (but with lots of English links) Korean History course blog.
Konrad Lawson did some very nice work in Korean history a while back (and more to come, I’m sure): among my favorites were his discussions of the language and reality of slavery and an old geography text.
Japan
Todd Crowell, whose blogging is really just an offshoot of his fine reportage, notes the end of almost four decades of Narita protests.
Imperialism is a running theme in blogging about Japanese history, for obvious reasons. Jane Pickard used Kenkoku Kinen no Hi to talk about imperialism and anti-emperor sentiment in her family. Joi Ito used his impressively deep family history to talk about Japan’s new National ID system. Mutant Frog (no, they’re not a heretical offshoot of our group, really!) noticed that the Kodansha publishing house had an imperialistic background. And in the cultural imperalism category, KokuRyu noted both some successes and some problems in Japanese archaeology.
Without question the most controversial post on Frog in a Well so far has been Tak’s Jared Diamond piece. Konrad Lawson’s been plumbing the depths of historical memory, in the form of nostalgia and movies.
Finally, some of my own meanderings. A question about 1590s warfare led to Stephen Turnbull’s history of the Japanese invasions of Korea, which led me to read Turnbull’s Ninja.
Endnotes
Special thanks to Konrad Lawson, Natalie Bennett, J. Otto Pohl, Manan Ahmed and Owen Miller. All errors of fact, spelling, interpretation or tone are entirely my fault. Probably.
Wanna waste some time? Simon World’s Asian Blogroll is your one-stop shop.
The position of host is open! If you’re an Asian history blogger, you can volunteer to host the 12/12 edition! Or, just write some good history between now and then, and share it with all of us. Contact me.
I have been reading through a collection of books about the road to Japan’s annexation of Korea, mostly somewhat dry political history for my tastes. It is orals year for me so there will be a lot of postings related to readings in preparation for my modern Japan and modern Korea field (when also relevant to Japanese history) exams next Spring.
Today, after re-reading Peter Duus The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895-1910 and taking some better notes, I wanted to do quick re-reads on this period in two other big narrative sweeps of Korean history: Carter J. Eckert, Ki-baik Lee, Young Ick Lew, Michael Robinson, and Edward W. Wagner eds. Korea Old and New: A History and Bruce Cumings Korea’s Place in the Sun. I then compared some notes with other books I read last year.
The complicated political history of the decades leading up to Japan’s annexation of Korea can tax the memory (I’ll post some notes on this at some point with people/timeline reference) and patience but at least the English language scholarship on this is quite limited, as far as I can tell. In contrast, disagreements and writing about Japanese imperialism in Korea has provoked some of the most bitter fights between Japanese and Korean scholars, even those who are eager to cooperate and don’t represent extreme wings in scholarship on either side.
I was interested, though not really surprised, to see that the differences on some of these touchy issues surrounding the 1905 Protectorate treaty etc. across the Pacific, seep into English language scholarship on the topic. Since many of these texts can find their way onto university history course materials, it is not without relevance for those teaching modern East Asian or Japan/Korea courses. These differences have a lot to do with which sources get used by the scholars in question, of course, and these usually trace back to previous Korean or Japanese secondary works on the issue. To show what I mean, below I’ll explore a few differences by comparing various accounts on a few specific events. I’ll use Young Ick Lew’s chapters in Korea Old and New as the starting point, since his claims come out the most concise and strongly worded.
Continue reading →
I am feeling very remiss for not having posted since Konrad gave me a log-in. I am a PhD student at Cambridge looking at China and Southeast Asia. My dissertation is (currently – it has undergone some metamorphoses) on social change as reflected in women’s writing 1880-1920.
I came across something a couple of days ago that I thought merited a post. This article from the New Criterion is of interest, discussing broadly the history of Western writers who were sympathetic to Mao, and how they influenced opinion in the West, and how the new Chang/Halliday book will change views on China. (a log-in may be required at the New Criterion site, don’t worry it is free)
I don’t know whether Winschuttle is overstating it, but then he is a controversialist. (and anyone in history should read his The Killing of History for a strong analysis on the culture wars within the discipline).
Send me [dresner at hawaii dot edu] your nominations of your best Asian history blogging in time for tomorrow’s Inaugural Asian History Carnival! Remember, if I don’t get a nomination, I might pick something of yours myself, and you can’t trust my judgement!
Last call: The inaugural Carnival of Asian History Blogging will go up tomorrow! Send me [dresner at hawaii dot edu] your best, your friends’ best, your blog-buddies’ best Asian history blogging.
I fortuitously caught the last twenty minutes or so of a panel discussion titled “The Meaning of the Russo-Japanese War Today” on NHK Kyoiku Television (channel 3 in Tokyo). This panel discussion inaugurated a three-day conference titled “East Asia and the World in the 20th Century and the Russo-Japanese War,” which was organized the Japanese Association of Modern East Asian History and held at Senshu University in Tokyo. The conference schedule is posted here in Japanese.
Discussants included:
The program squeezed a three-hour session into a 70-minute television slot, so I would imagine they had to leave out some of the discussion. Plus I was able to only catch the last twenty minutes, so most likely I missed much of it. But here are some of the points raised:
I wish I had caught the earlier half of the program. In particular I was interested in hearing about how the Russo-Japanese war is related to contemporary issues, such as the Yasukuni Shrine problem. I wonder if any readers of this blog caught the entire show, or perhaps even attended the conference.
An advertisement from the 20’s or 30’s, reprinted in上海广告. 上海：上海画报出版社, 1995.
This ad is for Golden Arrow cigarettes, and it announces a special contest. If you collect 72 of the trading cards in the packs you can trade them in for one of the cool modern commodities on the lower left: a cigarette case, a “stylish” raincoat, a watch, or a suitcase (perfect for your next train trip.) For 72 regular cards and one special card you can get a gold cigarette case, a radio, a pair of gold rings, or your own rickshaw. One assumes the smoker is going to hire someone to pull the thing for them, rather than going into business themselves.
The thing that really surprises me is that the cards all have pictures of Confucians. I realize that Confucius and co. had a much more varied history in the 20th century than one would think from reading May 4th polemics, but still the juxtaposition between the Big C and this cornucopia of commercial modernity is a little jarring for me. The students found it that way too, which is good, I guess, in that they have reached the point of not being able to explain the same things I can’t explain. Plus they are very forgiving of my being able to point things out but not explain them.
I seem to be blogging a lot about teaching of late, and this is something I used in class last night. Both I and the textbook (Schoppa) talk a lot about creating modernity and modern identities and such. Most of this focuses on state attempts to reform people, or at least the attempts of intellectuals. Like a lot of other people I also like to get away, when I can, from the political/revolutionary narrative, which is always hard to do in part because everything in 20th century China ends up getting reflected through the revolution. Unfortunately we (meaning I) are still at the stage of pointing at things that are outside the revolutionary narrative but not being able to name them.
According to People’s Daily English Edition China has turned 5,056 years old today. 5,000 years of timeless Chinese civilization, plus 56 years of New China. Always nice to read these things to get the current line straightened out. Still lots of stuff about how China was freed from oppression by the CCP. A nice quote from a 7th grader who hates studying modern history because it was “so bitter.” (I always tell mu students Chinese hate studying this period. Now I have a citation) Some stuff on how Communism led to economic development. Most interesting to me was the emphasis on democracy and minority rights.
Stability and prosperity can in no way be realized without democracy. By proceeding from its own conditions, New China practices the “system of multi-party cooperation under the leadership of the Communist Party of China,”
Minorities matter too.
All the 55 ethnic minorities have deputies to the NPC, who take 13.91% of the seats, although their combined population account for less than 9% of the national total. And their development and prosperity have always been high on the agenda of the leaders of the People’s Republic.
All of this democracy and equality will lead to more development.
Ensured by democracy, stability has ensured economic growth and social progress nationwide. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, China’s GDP has grown at annual rate greater than 9% since 1979, reaching 13,651.5 billion yuan (8.27 yuan against the U.S. dollar) in 2004, nearly double that of 1998. China is producing enough to feed one fifth of the world’s population though its arable land accounts for only 7% of the world’s total.
GNP figures we would get in the U.S. Emphasizing that we now grow enough food to feed ourselves is China.
I liked seeing democracy being presented as a necessity for economic growth, rather than a luxury good that will have to wait on development. If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, it is nice to see the tribute system getting restored.