Muninn

I took a great seminar on the history of the Chûshingura (忠臣蔵 or the story of the 赤穂浪人: the famous Japanese saga of the revenge of the 47 ronin) with Henry D. Smith at Columbia 2 years ago. We focused mostly on the imaginative potential of a historical event and the many fascinating ways that this event has moved through Japanese culture since the early 18th century. We all covered one aspect of this, my own being the changes in the portrayal of Chûshingura in prewar and wartime Japanese elementary school textbooks (some passages of which I translated if anyone is interested in reading more).

In his article “The Trouble with Terasaka” in the 2004 (No. 16) of the Nichibunken Japan Review Professor Smith writes about Chushingura and the controversary surrounding the mysterious samurai number 47, Terasaka Kichiemon. Not everyone who knows the famous story (google Chushingura, no time for links right now) knows that only 46 were sentenced to death by seppuku suicide and Terasaka lived a quiet life in the aftermath. Smith’s fascinating article explores not only the difficult question of what happened to Terasaka, but like our seminar did, tracks his changing face through the Chûshingura “imagination” in Japan in the centuries that followed. He ultimately concludes that Terasaka was not allowed to join the others because he the only one of the low ranking ashigaru (足軽) status.

As seen by the bushi elite, he was reduced to an expendable menial, but from the vantage point of the chônin audiences who were the most ardent consumers of the Chûshingura legend, he could be a heroic striver, living proof that even the lowest could become an honorable hero through dedication and skill. Terasaka functioned as a literally pivotal character in both the history and legend…since Terasaka could cut in different directions, he was thus a “troubling” figure who was often claimed and contested by rival audiences…The foot soldier Terasaka Kichiemon…occupied a…marginal place within the overall story, but one that by its very marginality sheds much light on the changing structure of Chûshingura over three centuries. (4)

Professor Smith has previously written on the common myths of Japanese history, such as the famous 4 level class system of early modern Japan, and in this article he expands on this to talk about the interesting marginal status of Terasaka and also the “in between” class of the 足軽 samurai.

The assumption has always been that sanctions just don’t work. Additionally, in an argument more persuasive with those of us with soft spots for the humanitarian side of the equation, the feeling is that sanctions often end up causing massive amounts of suffering amongst those outside a country’s ruling circle.

George A. Lopez and David Cortright argue in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs in their article “Containing Iraq: Sanctions Worked” that only in the aftermath of the Iraq war have we discovered, but largely ignored the fact that the sanctions were in fact working. They had contained Iraq, kept it from recovering its military capabilities, as well as its unconventional weapons programs, especially the development of a nuclear program.

“…The sanctions worked remarkably well in Iraq—far better than any past sanctions effort—and only a fraction of total oil revenue ever reached the Iraqi government. The funds that Baghdad obtained illicitely were grossly insufficient to finance a large-scale military development program. The government had no other major source of income, in part thanks to the economic impact of sanctions. Revenues from smuggling and kickbacks went mostly toward maintaining Saddam’s massive army and internal security apparatus (as well as to building palaces and paying bribes to political loyalists)…”

Essentially, the article argues in support of Hans Blix’s statement, in his recent book that, “the UN and the world had suceeded in disarming Iraq without knowing it.” I won’t go into more detail about their argument here but regardless of your position on this issue, the article gives a good overview of the history of Iraqi sanctions and is worth a read. It briefly addresses the recent UN kickbacks issues in its sections on how to improve sanctions, but does not say too much on the issue of the effect of sanctions on civilian populations. I don’t know enough about sanctions (either their effectiveness or humanitarian impact) to take a strong position but the article was educational.

I leave Takarazuka and my adventures in the Kansai region tomorrow morning and travel to Beijing and Qingdao for about a week. I’ll be back in Tokyo at the end of the month and leave Japan August 15th. I’ll be back visiting my parents in Bartlesville, Oklahoma until early September, when I move to Boston.

As a kind of follow up to my recent article at Chanpon.org on Japan “Losing its soul” I have also noticed a lot of posters in recent Japanese advertisements which claim that visiting some place will help you discover yourself—that is, discover one’s latent or forgotten Japanese identity. Today I noticed just such a poster on the bus going from Kinkakuji to Ryôanji promoting tourism to Kyoto:

「日本に、京都があってよかった。こころの風景、うつくしい時間にこだわった、千二百余年。時代をこえて、永遠をつなぐ風がこの町を駆け抜ける。平安をもとめつづけるこの都で、風に吹かれて出会うのは、”知らなかったワタシ”だったりする。」

I am so glad Japan has this place called Kyoto. It is a landscape of the spirit that, for some thousand and two hundred years has devoted itself to spending time surrounded by beauty. Spanning the ages, a wind bound to eternity runs through this town. In this [ancient] capital that always yearned for peace (Heian) I think I might have found, blowing in the wind, “A Me that I have never known.”

Feel free to correct my translation, but if it seems a little on the cheesy side, I assure you it was no less so in the original. Sayaka noticed that the “Heian” is probably deliberately used with two meanings, peace (which is a very important component of Japan’s national identity in the postwar period), and as the name for the period when the capital was moved to Kyoto and also representative of its glory days.
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I love going through the book offerings at Japanese shrines, where you are almost guaranteed to get some gems. At Kasuga Taisha (春日大社) in Nara, I found a series of childrens’ books entitled “Japan: A Good Country” (『日本いい国に』). Each chapter was designed to give children a lesson in how to be a good Japanese or on how wonderful Japan is. I opened to a random page which came from a chapter on the “Japanese Diet” and found the following passage (running short on time so I’ll just post my English translation):

In France, the French eat mainly French food, in China they eat mainly Chinese food. This is a pretty obvious fact (当たり前) but in each country they primarily eat that country’s food. And yet, in Japan’s case, we are importing all kinds of food from many different foreign lands and eating all kinds of different things. There isn’t any other country which has made such a mess of (バラバラになった) even their own dietary habits (自分たちの主食までも).

After giving my final presentation at Waseda University, where I have spent the last two years as a “research student” 研究生, I left immediately for the Kansai area of central Japan to join Sayaka and her family in her hometown of Takarazuka 宝塚. The next three days were spent traveling around to nearby sites that I have, in all my time in Japan, never gotten around to visiting. Sunday was spent visiting Nara (see some of my pictures here) while the next two days were spent in Kyoto (some pictures here). It is a bit ironic that I have spent some of my last days in Japan in two cities tourists usually spend their first nights, but I’m very happy to have had the opportunity to visit.

The Kansai region is different from the Kantô area of Tokyo in many ways and since I have spent very little time in the former, some of these differences are quite new to me. Two little tidbits that have escaped my notice all this time: 1) Tatami mats, the size of which are a common measurement for the size of rooms and apartments, are apparently significantly larger in the Kansai area. I am told, however, that the “standard” Tokyo size of tatami mats are becoming more widespread. 2) In the Tokyo area, people stand on the left side of the escalator and walk up the right side. In the Kansai area, people stand on the right side and walk up the left side. Sayaka said something about seeing a TV news clipping which explained this as having something to do with the location of the exit in the first department store in which escalators were used in Japan. I’m really curious to know where this practice switches sides. Presumably, somewhere between Osaka and Tokyo, escalator-standing-culture switches sides…anyone know where? While I’m on this type of topic, I always wondered what the border between Sweden and Norway looked like back in the days when the Swedes drove on the left hand side of the road….two great questions for an idle google moment.

UPDATE: I found out a little more about the history of the Sweden case of switching from left to right on this web page (can’t vouch for its accuracy)

After losing their surnames during Communist Rule, since 1997 Mongolians have been required to have them again. This interesting saga has, among other things, led to everyone wanting Genghis Khan’s tribal name “Brojigin.” Read more about this on this posting at Keywords and this article. I also talked a little bit about Mongolia’s national fascination with Genghis Khan here.

The Taiwanese Vice President has always been a bit loopy, but really… Read more in the pro-DPP Taipei Times. She also said that, “The government must have an advanced immigration policy, because Taiwan is so small while the population is increasing quickly.” Hmm…shifting an aboriginal population overseas…wouldn’t that make it an emigration policy? Seriously though, this issue does bring to the fore the issue of environmental preservation versus the rights of native populations to hunt and continue traditional practices. (via Taipei Kid)

There is a great collection of Cold War related docs at Woodrow Wilson Cold War International History Project. There is a really interesting collection of articles and (and in many cases newly discovered) primary documents related to the DPRK. (Thanks to Budaechigae for this awesome link) Incidentally, I am not really comfortable with many of the Korea related blogs around which constantly refer to the DPRK as the “norks.” I don’t know anything about the origin of the term but it has a similar ring to “japs”, “chinks”, and “gooks” etc. It is interesting to note that I haven’t seen any of them refer to the South Koreans as “soks” so I think there is a good possibility they are engaging in a kind of classic dehumanizing objectification of a perceived enemy. I hope they might consider using “DPRK” or even “N.K.” or something if they want an easy abbreviation for North Korea.

Scott Sommers in Taiwan has a very interesting collection of postings on the issue of English Teachers as Migrants over at his Taiwan Blog. While the issues covered in the postings vary and I don’t have time to give my own take on everything here, I found lots of fascinating little tidbits. One of the postings has statistics showing that Canadian teachers outnumber American teachers, and there is a third large group of teachers: South Africans (17.66%) with South Africans being the largest single group in Taipei county. I have noted a similar prominence of Australian teachers in Japan (though I have no statistics on hand) and on the bullet train yesterday, I noticed that all the English announcements were done by an Australian.