Muninn

I found a great ramen noodle place in the middle of Kichijoji today as I was hunting for dinner in my neighborhood. It is called Tenbunkan (天文館) and both their Kyûshû-style tonkotsu miso ramen and gyôza dumplings were fantastic.

I love Japanese ramen. I’m not talking about the kind we survived on as poor college students. I’m talkin’ about the real thing. Noodle soups with carefully kept secret recipes, a variety of vegetables, and sometimes an egg or thin round cuts of meat. Unfortunately, I never found any noodles in Beijing that I liked, and I tried many of their huge variety of noodles when I was there.

In Japan, ramen noodles are a highly developed food industry, with a cult following. See the movie Tampopo for an excellent and humorous peek into the ramen world of Japan. In addition to being delicious, even the best noodle stops are quick, relatively cheap, and totally fill you up. There are of course a lot of bad noodles in Japan with a kind of standard drab taste, but there are also thousands of branded and often highly unique ramen shops all over Japan. You can buy any number of ramen guidebooks to help you explore the variety available in your city and there is always the Ramen Museum where you can taste some of the best that Japan has to offer. Tonkotsu miso, spicy miso, and regular miso styles are my favorites. I think I might have to eventually add a page here listing my favorite Tokyo ramen places.

I rented some movies to watch while staying warm under a blanket and recovering from a nasty cold. None were any good so I cut them all off soon after they started but by chance I saw that Japanese TV was showing a US movie without dubbing it (for once). It was “The Way of the Gun” and initially looked like a pretty mindless way to drift in and out of sleep. However, after watching it I have to say it is probably the best kidnapping/action movie I have ever seen.

I was impressed by the complexity of its characters, their interaction, and the fact that the audience isn’t treated like an idiot. I never thought a movie with a name and plot like this could have subtlety. The action, for what it is worth, was also impressive, with everyone behaving like they actually had training in tactics rather than growing up on too many cheesy police shows. The bad guy bodyguards are even given a little more than the usual, with them hatching their own plots and affairs and also behaving half way intelligently.

I am very interested in the retelling of stories of armed resistance against oppressors. This is partly because they inevitably also include a portrayal of collaboration, which is something I expect to be spending a lot of time studying.

I recently watched the TV dramatization of the 1943 Jewish ghetto uprising in Warsaw called Uprising.

The uprising gets brief mention in many movies about the Holocaust, most recently with a single scene in the movie The Pianist. In that movie, the hopelessness of the uprising is viewed from the window of the hiding musician. That scene is very reminiscent of a portrayal of Chinese resistance against Japanese troops entering Shanghai in an early scene of Empire of the Sun.

Uprising takes a very different look at the Jewish resistance, awarding it more honor, glory, and considerably more German casualties than earlier portrayals or the historical record suggests. It has all the limitations of a made for TV movie, but does a fair job, especially with its more complex and careful consideration of the Jewish Council and its collaboration with the Germans. A Danish review of the movie is less forgiving, concluding that in its own way it is a wonderful old fashioned movie but that it never quite convinced us of the need to tell the story of the uprising again (”Det er på sin vis en ganske glimrende, lidt gammeldags film, som aldrig helt får overbevist os om det nødvendige i at fortælle denne historie igen”). I agree wholeheartedly with the review when it complained that the “Allo Allo english” everyone spoke was taxing.

When I see movies like this I realize that the art of portraying the nobel resistance has been been perfected to a fine art. Not to detract from the horror that faced those living in the ghetto, or under any kind of oppression that has bred resistance and artistic narratives of that resistance, I’m interested in how consistent these portrayals all are. First you need to introduce a few humble figures who just don’t want to get into any trouble, and are just trying to survive. You subject them to a series of atrocities at the hand of their oppressors, and you need to include a few scenes with completely diabolical and laughing evil soldiers who have no respect for people or the value of their lives. The main characters then become hardened realists who will do anything to kill their enemy in armed resistance, portraying anyone who has not yet been converted as weak cowards. Overnight, collaborators go from figures who are negotiated with and reluctantly obeyed, to being the targets of assassination and torture. Once this polarization is complete, the movie stands on firm black and white moral ground and can proceed with uncontrolled violence…
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Chia-ying says I have too many friends. My taiwanese friend from graduate school in New York complained that she never felt like she could get to know me because my social circle was too wide. She said this to me some weeks ago in Taiwan but her words have stuck with me.

Chia-ying might be surprised to hear another story from my time at a summer language program in Beijing some five years ago. I used to spend everyday with my roommate Stuart and almost every meal at Korean restaurant on the northern side of the Beijing Normal University campus where I first discovered Bibimbap. I spent hours a day making and studying little paper vocabulary flashcards and when I needed a break I would ride my bicycle around the back streets of Beijing. A Chinese-American classmate, who I called Da-lin and had a crush on at the time joined me for lunch at my favorite little restaurant one day. While I was loudly slurping some noodles she suddenly put her chopsticks down and broke (for the first time that I had seen) the vow that we all signed that summer promising to speak nothing but Chinese for ten weeks. She said, “Lin Shudao, you are asocial, aren’t you?” Without waiting for my answer, she continued eating and our discussion resumed in Chinese…

I think she was right, by any definition of the word. I spent little or no time with other students in the program. Here in Japan, my friend Lars has essentially accused me of the same, claiming that I rarely emerge from my cottage to “go out” with friends, resembling a hermit if anything else.

Yet if you ask my Danish friend Jens here what I’m doing and he’ll claim that I’m always off meeting yet another friend in Ginza, or Shinjuku or Shibuya, as if I was some high-spending social butterfly.

In New York, I spent almost all my time with Sayaka and Jai (Sayaka was worried the amount of time I spent with Jai was revealing some kind of bisexual tendencies, which I have ever since tried to convince her is unfounded). And yet Chia-ying and other friends believed that I was all over the place.

In thinking about Chia-ying’s memorable words, and Da-lin’s before that, I tried to explain the seeming contradiction by saying, “I just don’t settle well into groups of friends, but prefer to develop strong friendships with people one-on-one, without ‘inheriting’ their whole social network.” Yes, I liked that one. It gives me that individualist, rugged traveler and leader type of image.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work….
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It is about four in the morning and I am reading through a book on the history of Chinese law for my research on Chinese treason trials. The book, however, is a mainland Chinese work, a bit heavy on the Communist propaganda, entitled A Legal History of the Chinese Revolution (中国革命法制史). I saw plenty of this kind of work in many a Beijing bookstore. However, I didn’t get it in Beijing, but photocopied relevant sections from the library of Taiwan’s Academia Sinica when I was there last month.

As I was copying the publication information in order to correctly cite the book in a paper I’m working on, I noticed something straight out of the cold war and China’s unfinished civil war between mainland China and nationalist China on Taiwan:

A stamp on the middle of my photocopy of the book’s cover which reads:

限制閱讀
“Restricted Reading”

I realized that this, like many books once locked up in libraries and archives across Taiwan, was marked as a Communist book, and thus during most of Taiwan’s postwar period would have been off limits to most readers.