Frog in a Well

Viewing Africa from Asia

Posted on August 26, 2005 by Alan Baumler / 4 Comments

(This is a comment on Tim Burke’s syllabus on Images of Africa cross-posted from his blog. I am putting it up here to see if anyone has any suggestions on images of Africa in East Asia)

I’m not sure what literature there would be on Indian views of Africa, (Bend in the River comes to mind) because they were never articulated as part of a larger imperial project. You need an imperial state for archives and to encourage people to think of what they are doing as “changing Africa.” I’m pretty sure there were a lot of Indians in East Africa, and that they had at least an economic impact.

As for East Asia (the place I know best) there is some stuff that probably would not matter. Kenzaburo Oe’s A Personal Matter has a character who obsesses about Africa, but that is just using Africa as a conveniently blank Other. There is a lot of that. I can’t see why it would matter much to African history. I assume you know Phillip Snow’s The Star Raft, which has some stuff on Chinese attitudes towards Africa in the context of development aid, where it would actually matter. I would have to think that some of the Africans who studied in China or Russia must have written memoirs or something by now.

Another topic you might want to consider is the relationship between the imperial and popular and post ’45 aid-organization discourses and the academic discourse you are asking them to join. Donald Lopez did a very interesting book called Prisoners of Shangri-la on basically that topic but dealing with Tibet. I liked the book a lot because he traced the development of the popular discourse very well (Tibet has a much more unitary image than Africa) but also because he was pretty clear that this popular discourse and the academic one were closely related. Of course there is a lot of stuff on how modern Asian studies is connected to the imperial projects.

China/General

Eat and run

Posted on August 25, 2005 by Alan Baumler / 3 Comments

Chinese food culture

There is a current series on Amsterdam on Slate where Seth Stevenson suggests that the Dutch are almost never seen walking and eating. Americans, of course do it all the time, and of course we also drive and eat. This got me to thinking about Chinese food culture and wondering if I had been behaving badly. In China and especially in Taiwan there is of course a lot of street food, and I of course have eaten a lot of it. One of the things I don’t remember seeing very often is someone eating and walking. People buying 生煎包子 and taking them home in plastic bags I remember. I can recall at least a few people getting 包子 for breakfast and parking themselves on the street right near the place and eating, but that was rare. (I did it all the time, so I am pretty sure on this one.) Lots of places seemed to have little tables for quick eating, whereas for Americans they might not be needed. Eating breakfast at your desk at work seemed more common, or at least more obvious.

None of this is all that surprising, of course. Watson’s Golden Arches East had some stuff on how the all-powerful arches had failed to change the cultures of eating food in East Asia. I am not surprised to see that American food culture is not universal. What I would like to know is.

1. Is my impression that Chinese don’t eat on the move correct? I was not really paying attention. I’m not really talking about things like lunchboxes, but the American style of eating a hotdog while walking down the street. (Is ice cream an exception? I eat a lot of ice cream while walking, but don’t remember others doing it.)
2. If it is less common, where does it happen? Is this culture changing, and if so how?

Academia/English/Japan/明治/江戸

Early Modern Japan On-Line

Posted on August 24, 2005 by Jonathan Dresner / 2 Comments

Philip Brown has announced that Early Modern Japan, the journal of the Early Modern Japan Network will become an on-line publication. Back issues are already available as PDFs through the EMJ webpage, and the prospect of reaching a larger audience with lower costs is too good to pass up.

In other Early Modern News, most of us in the field have probably already heard about the death of Edo scholar extraordinaire Donald Shively. [thanks to my translator friend for the NYTimes obit; it’s good that he’s getting wider notice] My library is replete with his work, and yours should be, too. Our sympathies to his family.

China/Economics/General/Post-Mao/Republican

Nourish the people with cheap diesel

Posted on August 19, 2005 by Alan Baumler / 3 Comments

In the post below Jonathan asked how a Confucian China could really be in the future. One possible bit of data comes from this article (From Brad DeLong). NYT reports that there are gas shortages in Southeast China because refineries are not willing to process crude at current low (state-set) prices. I suspect that things are actually more complex than that, but what I find interesting is that people are apparently hording gas in expectation that prices will go up. In other words they think that the state will adopt a market solution. If China had a more “Confucian” government they might take a more corporatist approach, and keep prices low for the benefit of consumers and farmers or whatever. (I’m an American, so the idea of cheap gas as a civil right is familiar to me.) For Confucian economic policy think of MITI in Japan and how it developed a whole range of ways to encourage firms to behave in a way that was for the good of Japan, as MITI saw it, rather than always for profits. I don’t see China heading in that direction. In part I just don’t see it, it is not happening. In part I can’t see where that would come from. China seems to have some pretty sophisticated economic policy makers, and they seem to look more to the US than Japan for models, which makes sense in 2005.

On top of that, I don’t think you can call a pure lassie faire policy like in Hong Kong in the old days Confucian. I can think of few things less Confucian than saying that the state does not matter, and should not have a role in regulating society. Nor do I see the CCP saying something like that any time soon. Without going too far into the “is it Confucianism” thing, it sounds a lot like the Republican era, or Taiwan, with a powerful state sector with at least some corporatist urges trying to control a fairly anarchic economic system but without the willingness to develop the methods of economic control you saw in Japan.

China/China-Japan/Civil War/Diplomacy/English/Japan/Taiwan/War

51st State?

Posted on August 15, 2005 by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

From a formal legal standpoint, the United States never ceded possession of Taiwan [via Simon World], which it took from Japan in 1945, to the Nationalist government. It’s still ours!

This raises all kinds of interesting issues, if you take these sorts of things seriously (with international law, it’s hard, because nobody really pays that much attention to the paperwork, do they?). The last time we gave away something we took from the Japanese, instead of making it an independent state (as most of its inhabitants wanted) we gave it back: Okinawa. Of course, we have a different relationship with China….

bibliography/Economic/Japan/Literature/昭和

The Price of Historical Accuracy

Posted on August 11, 2005 by tak / 3 Comments

Recently I received an email from a novelist out on the West Coast who is working on a historical novel set in 1946 Japan. She wanted to know how much things cost at that time. Being an anthropologist and not a historian, I really had no idea where to look, other than to say that in 1946 prices must have been really unstable because of inflation, SCAP’s attempt to engineer the market while at the same time implement labor-friendly policies, and the proliferation of the black market. A great description of the social landscape at that time is in John Dower’s superb Embracing Defeat, especially the first section where he takes you right to the streets of postwar Tokyo so that you can smell the cheap kasutori liquor and see the pan-pan girls hanging onto U.S. servicemen. (Another book I have read that deals with this same time period is Chalmers Johnson’s gripping Conspiracy at Matsukawa).

But I asked around to see if there are easier ways of finding out other than combing through long passages, and sure enough our ever resourceful Jonathan Dresner recommended two reference books: Estimates of Long Term Economic Statistics of Japan since 1868 (bilingual) and the Historical Statistics of Japan.

He also had a brilliant suggestion of looking at microfilms of newspapers at that time and picking off prices of products through ads. I would never have thought of that!

(For those wishing to have questions answered, a more helpful place to ask might be over at H-Japan, a resourceful user group that focuses on Japanese history. They cast a much wider net of scholars there, so you might get more in-depth responses.)

I have to say, its nice to see fiction writers taking the time to do some historical research for their writing. When films like The Last Samurai mutilate history, it really is a travesty because a little veracity would have made the film truly powerful (my opinion). Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is also that much more convincing to the reader. So perhaps it’s worth paying the price of meticulous research to push for historical accuracy.

But then, I also think that if you’re writing a novel like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Pale View of Hills, then accuracy doesn’t really matter because it is all about how memories from one moment of your life become all confused with things that happened in other moments. (This is not to say that Ishiguro’s novel contained historical inaccuracies.)

Japan/Korea-Japan/Memory/Nationalism/Politics/Web Sites

Kotaji on Korea (& Japan)

Posted on August 10, 2005 by tak / 1 Comment

I wanted to quickly mention two fascinating posts by Kotaji in the last two weeks that may be of interest to readers here.

First, he refers to an article in OhMyNews about a village near Kyoto composed of those of Korean descent who are resisting the destruction of their neighborhood. Kotaji picks up on the dissonance between the way the South Korean media has covered this story and the villagers who are squatting in defiance.

Second, he reports on a talk at Yonsei University given by Pak Noja . A part of the lecture (transcript here in Korean) focuses on the links between North Korea and the legacy left by Japanese imperialism, and Kotaji has graciously translated a few paragraphs into English. Here is Pak’s main point:

So, when General Kim Il-sung was constructing a nation state, he brought in considerable parts of the apparatus of state control and repression that were taken from the mechanisms of administration of the Japanese imperialists, the very people he had been struggling against up until then. In other words, it is hard to get rid of the sense that the state created by the nationalists in some way inherited a great deal from the imperialist state.

Archaeology/Cultural/English/Japan/Religion/Web Sites

The Lost Tribe

Posted on August 7, 2005 by Jonathan Dresner / 4 Comments

Ralph Luker sent me a link which I’d seen before, but lost: Arimasa Kubo’s “Israelites Came To Ancient Japan” pages. It’s a great mix of logical and historical fallacies, mostly having to do with ignoring actual archaeological evidence of Japanese origins and traditions. Most of the rest have to do with ignoring the commonality of certain practices among world religions (as my father says, if all you have is two points, you can draw a line). There are a few which are kind of interesting, but they are usually local customs which are not “Japanese” in the sense of being common to any significant portion of the population and which are rather poorly sourced. At some point, I suppose, I ought to check out the books that he cites, to see if they have footnotes to anything remotely credible.

English/Film/Japan/昭和

The Wushe Incident on Film

Posted on August 5, 2005 by tak / 1 Comment

Kerim at his blog Keywords alerts us to a film, currently under production, that reconstructs the Wushe Incident (霧社事件), the famous aboriginal Taiwanese rebellion against the Japanese in 1930. The planned title of the film is “Seediq Bale” (賽德克巴萊), and the official site has previews. As you’ll see from the video the film is in Seediq and Japanese, with either Chinese or English subtitles. [Warning: the preview has a few violent scenes and may not be for the squeamish]

In Japanese the uprising is known as the Musha Jiken. Interesting tidbit: according to the Japanese Wikipedia entry on “Aboriginal Taiwanese” (台湾原住民), after the Wushe Incident the Japanese officers used the aboriginal headhunting practice to squash the uprising by offering large sums of money in exchange for the heads of the rebellion leaders.

In the same post Kerim also cites the excellent journal article on the Wushe Incident by Leo Ching, which in an altered form is also included in his book Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation.

Here is the article citation: Ching, Leo T. S. 2000. “Savage Construction and Civility Making: the Musha Incident and Aboriginal Representations in Colonial Taiwan.” Positions 8 (3): 795-818.

Art/Books and Articles/Cultural/English/Japan/昭和

Jazz in Japan

Posted on August 3, 2005 by tak / 1 Comment

Michael Molasky, who teaches at University of Minnesota and has published on Okinawa literature (this and this), has recently released a book in Japanese on the history of jazz in postwar Japan. (I could not find an English version at Amazon so perhaps it is not appearing in English.)

The book title is 戦後日本のジャズ文化―映画・文学・アングラ, which translates as Jazz Culture in Postwar Japan: Film, Literature, and the Underground. The last phrase, angura, refers to the underground art scene that flourished in the 1960s.

According to the bio on Amazon taken from the book, the author is also a jazz pianist and plays regularly in Tokyo.

(via 作品メモランダム)

English/War/昭和

Nearing the End Picture Collection

Posted on August 2, 2005 by K. M. Lawson / 0 Comment

As we approach the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII and Japan’s defeat, a number of Japanese newspapers are beginning to turn out articles and other materials related to the war and its conclusion. The English language Mainichi Daily News has already posted a collection of photographs that might be worth a look. There is an interesting unity of theme in the collection which is useful to point out. Most photos are of evacuated children, shacks appearing in bombed out areas, defiant children’s letters and drawings, government officials handling claims related to bomb damage, and pictures showing enthusiastic military recruits as the war nears an end. Overall, the photos gives the strong image of a strong and resilient Japan. This image, of course, most likely reflect the scarcity of photos taken from this period that show anything but the kinds of images the government of the time would want to show.

UPDATE: A second batch, with many more pictures is now online with more scenes from the end of the war.

English/General/Japan/Memory/War/昭和

I hate this time of year

Posted on August 1, 2005 by Jonathan Dresner / 1 Comment

I hate this time of year. I’ve hated it for a long time, and for good reason.

Now, thanks to my good friend Ralph Luker, I have more reasons to thoroughly hate it again.

Worse, I’m going to have to go through it again in a few months, what with my 20th century Japan class coming up this semester….

Books and Articles/English/Japan

A Cyberpunk-ish Tale of a Young Missing Historian

Posted on August 1, 2005 by tak / 0 Comment

A Japan historian in a novel! The New York Times has a book review of The Method Actors by Carl Shuker. The review says:

Shuker’s basic plot concerns the disappearance from modern-day Tokyo of Michael Edwards, a young historian specializing in war crimes, and his sister’s attempts to find him.

I wonder if any of our Froggies lead such exhilarating lives during their research stays in Japan! I had a run-in with some local yakuza once, but in general my fieldwork was tame and did not involve my disappearance.

Here is a fuller description from Amazon:

Kiwinovelist Shuker’s debut follows a set of gaijin—young international 20-somethings who have gravitated to ultrahip, fast-forward Tokyo—as one of their number goes missing. A young Wellington-born military historian researching the Rape of Nanking, Michael Edwards suddenly disappears from his coterie, and his ex-pat clan swings into action despite their own problems. Michael’s sister Meredith, 22, rushes back from a U.S. trip and must negotiate their complicated family’s concern, as well as her own lack of direction. Catherine (married at 24 and having recently ended an affair with Michael), Yasuhiko (a misfit ex-botanist drug dealer to the rich and foreign), New Zealander Simon and his occasional bedmate Jacques—all get involved to one degree or another, when they can stop thinking about fashion, sex or drugs. Shuker uses short sections titled by character to shift back and forth in time, place and perspective. Meredith tirelessly roots around her brother’s life, but the complex, grandiose scope of Michael’s research (which may hold the key) pales in comparison to the Tokyo appearance of Catherine’s husband. Shuker’s dizzying debut shimmers with authentic detail, an uncanny, otherworldly sense of place and a cast of believably hardcore hipsters.