Muninn

I should be watching Korean dramas and such on TV here in Seoul to improve my horrible listening skills, but tonight I ended up seeking the familiar comfort of the Japanese public television channel NHK, which for some reason I can get here in my dormitory. Tonight they were showing a documentary on Fenghuang （凤凰) in Hunan province.

Most travel documentaries that I watched on Japanese channels in the past consist of the TV host introducing the audience to the delicacies of some particular location, places to stay, and then the famous tourist attractions of the area (roughly in that order). Most of the time seems to go to watching people eat and then search desperately for some new way to elegantly describe how much they loved the food.

While choosing a location that is popular with tourists, this NHK documentary was nothing of the sort. The series, called 世界ふれあい街歩き uses the interest format of simply following a smoothly moving camera throughout the city. What impressed me most was the fact that it spent most of its time on the back streets and went out of its way to give the audience a feel for various aspects of the daily life of its inhabitants. I found the whole program to be an extremely effective format for generating a feeling of presence for the viewer.

Although I don’t know how orchestrated the interaction with the Chinese locals in the documentary is, it successfully creates an extremely casual feel. As the camera moves through the maze of back alleys (just watching this almost brought forth tears of nostalgia for my time spent in China) a Japanese woman’s voice provides a running commentary of the “thoughts” and voice of the person we are supposed to be in this documentary. Whenever we come upon something interesting, the camera stops and we have a conversation with whoever is in view of the camera that might provide some answers. It can be anything as simple as noting the fact that socks are being dried in the hundreds on the windows in a high school dormitory, to looking out a shop window and seeing a woman lower a mop into the river to wash it while other women at the water’s edge below are using the same river water to wash clothes and vegetables. At another point we stop and chat with a woman washing clothes outside her house and talk to a tile maker about the particular kind of tiles made for the roof.

There were two or three “Information” breaks during which some local expert talks about something we just watched (the tile maker talked about roofs, another old man talked about the houses leaning out over the river) The only overtly touristy thing I saw during the program was an attempt to find the southern gate of the town but we instead find nothing but a pile of rubble. Wondering what happened to the gate “We” ask an old woman, but she just says, “It was taken apart.” Unsatisfied, “we” enter a nearby noodle shop and ask another couple about the gate. While the woman buries her head in a bowl of noodles, the old man there explains that the gate was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.

At one point we get lost in the back alleys as we continually come to signs saying “no way through this way.” This eventually leads us to some kind of housing for students and the camera takes us up to their room where we ask (and get) and answer to the mystery of the aforementioned socks. In another scene, we pass an old man watching something out his window. We discover he is looking at the flowers in his garden, and are promptly given a tour of his little cultivated plot across from his house along a hill. In yet another scene, we come upon an old couple playing a chess-like game (I can’t remember what it is called but it is the one which is shaped something like a web, and you can put black and white pieces on top of each other…). The board is simply painted on cardboard and the pieces are made out of broken tile (black) and onions (white). When the old man loses, he trades the onion pieces for carrots and later tomatoes but the delighted old woman continues to beat him.

If you have access to NHK, I highly recommend the documentary, even if there are some idle moments as the camera wanders through occasionally empty streets (this only adds to the participatory feel for the viewer). You can find its schedule (and locations) for future episodes here.

I have a very disorganized collection of pictures from my travels that I have linked to in various older postings. They are floating around online but not much fun to hunt down without looking through the archives of this blog as well as over at my homepage. For convenience, I will be keeping links to the various online pictures in one central place:

Muninn Picture Page

All pictures are available for use under a Creative Commons license.

The twelfth History Carnival is up at Over at Mode for Caleb. Enjoy some of the interesting postings related to history that have been collected there. Send your nominations for the next History Carnival to willisms[at]gmail[dot]com as it will be hosted at WILLisms on August 1st.

The street map searching feature works for Japan now! Here, for example is the street map of Lucky House where I lived for most of my almost two years in Japan 2002-2004 (My Waseda friend Andrew is now living there). It even shows many of the convenience stores I came to know so well… Unfortunatley the satellite picture for just this particular section is horrible, but since great satellite images of nearby areas are available perhaps this will get better. Of course, lots of similar mapping sites in Japanese but great to see Google add this with its convenient live scrolling feature.

NOTE: In case anyone was wondering, Dokto/Takeshima is not included in the Japan collection of street maps (even islands without roads have their names conveniently labelled) which seems to imply Google is siding with Korea on this one. However, the “Northern Territories” above Hokkaido, which are disputed with Russia, are labeled, though no roads are shown for them. If there emerges any uproar from Japan or Russia regarding this, can you imagine if Google were to try to include China and Taiwan in its global mapping scheme, or any of the many other disputed territories on the planet? UPDATE: I should really add, however, that Google probably just took whatever maps were supplied to them by the (presumably) Japanese company which provided them and thus we shouldn’t read any kind of thought out “google policy” into this. However, I think it serves to show the difficulty in providing maps services with global audiences. We may see the appearance of National Geographic-style “disputed” labels eventually.

So far looks like casualties are low, but who knows what the final number will be. Very tragic day for London.

Here is the WikiNews page collecting information on this and links to other articles:

WikiNews London Blasts
Wiki Article on the Blasts (Contents Changing rapidly)
BBC Live News Stream
Guardian News Blog on the Blasts

I’m watching a Hercule Poirot mystery (”The Incredible Theft”) and there is a great and memorable line, especially fit for historians. Poirot’s secretary explains that she wouldn’t take an anonymous caller because without a name, she wouldn’t know where to put her file. Poirot replies:

Life first, Ms. Lemon, filing second.

Korea and Japan both have really led the way in the whole genre of horror which appeals to a new generation of youth, especially women. America and Hong Kong are following behind, translating and redoing some of these movies (Ring, Grudge) or making others in the same vein (White Noise, the Eye) but many of them have a very derivative feel.

Of course there is lots of borrowing the other way as well, and much of it to great effect. The beautifully filmed Korean movie “A Tale of Two Sisters” (which I highly recommend despite many contradictions and loose ends) borrows heavily from US movie plots, and comes off as a combination of “Sixth Sense“, Japan’s “Audition“, “Identity” and a few other psychological thrillers. This sort of mixing and matching of ideas is what creating culture is all about.

Some of the stuff coming out though is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. The Korean version of the Japanese “Ring” was really awful. The Japanese mini-series version of the story also sucked. The sequels got a bit too scientific and Darwinian in their message. Other Japanese and Korean movies coming out recently are also trying to capitalize on the bizarre but terrifying example of the “Ring” have made ridiculous versions of a similar concept.

Many of these movies involve some kind of object (like a cellphone, or a stereo and its white noise) being cursed or otherwise being connected to the world of the dead. Today I saw one example of how bad it can get. A horror movie showing on SBS here in Seoul this evening is clearly a knockoff of the same idea. In the “Ring” (I know this sounds stupid but the Japanese movie is really a classic) a cursed video, when watched, shows a bizarre female figure. Those who watch the movie are cursed (mostly school girls) and the frightening long black haired female figure kills them a week later or something. Long black-haired ghosts seem to be a consistent theme here, but they will be familiar to anyone who has read old Japanese ghost stories or seen the movie Kwaidan. In tonight’s movie, instead of a cursed video, the school girls are slain by:

A cursed sticker-picture vending machine

When their picture gets taken in the machine, a mysterious and horrifying female figure is seen behind them in the picture, foreshadowing their impending death.

Anyone who has spent any time in Korea is familiar with the irredentist issue of the Dokto/Takeshima/Lioncourt islands. This is one of the hundreds of issues around the world where two or more countries both claim the same hunk of rock as their own. Both sides bring out cute historical maps and literary accounts to suggest that “their” people or “their” nation claimed the territory first and like children on a playground try to project these historical references or claims into the modern present. That we are still engaged in this kind of idiocy in the 21st century is a tribute to humanity’s lack of intelligence.

The two pieces of rock inconveniently dare to emerge from the water somewhere north of the red arrow (see the string of black shadow like blobs, probably one of those, but not enough land to show up in this Google satellite photo, please don’t try to explain exactly which one it is in the comments - I really couldn’t care less, another map here) To be honest, I’m so sick of the whole thing: I have reached Dokto saturation level and this posting will be my first and last on the topic…
(more…)

The Korea wave has hit Taiwan too. In case there was any doubt, here is an advertisement for “Korean-style” plastic surgery available in Taipei’s Ximen area.

Not only is the plastic surgery Korean style, but you can even look like Bae Yong-jun, known in Japan as “Yong-sama”! Check out their “before” and “after” pictures in this advertisement.

They might even give you some Yong-sama glasses to complete the effect! Read more about their products at their phone-number-website.

Interesting article here by a graduate student who, for some reason, is in the military and training to be shipped to Iraq as part of the American occupation. I think we should all read material like this (which you can find all over the place if you look for it) to be reminded that US military forces offer no exception to the kinds of rules, training, and perceptions soldiers get, in this case even before even being put on the ground, in a situation where there is an active insurgency.

Here are some examples of the advice he has been getting from more experienced soldiers he has come across:

You can’t tell which Iraqis are going to try to kill you, so you should act on any doubt or suspicion you have by cutting down anyone who makes you nervous. Act on hunches; pull the trigger. It may turn out to be the wrong choice, but it’s a wrong choice that you’ll live through.

An NCO explained to a class that the ragheads won’t understand what you tell them, and you won’t understand that little gobbledy-gook that they talk, so the best way to get them on the ground to search them is to kick ‘em in the balls or butt-stroke ‘em in the face. That they’ll understand.

While there are important and highly relevant differences in the scale of violence, I have read very similar statements to these being made by Japanese soldiers in occupied China, German occupation soldiers in wartime Europe, and in the example most relevant for Americans, of course, made by troops in Vietnam. Again, highly important differences in scale and thankfully there are other forms of violence (rape, large massacres) which are far less prevalent in this conflict, but it is important to remember that an occupied people will come into contact with this day-to-day level of violence and racism by the troops in their midsts, and depending on a number of factors, it can produce powerful and long-lasting memories.