Comments on: A Few Anecdotes

By: Muninn » 2006 - Year in Review

Muninn » 2006 - Year in Review — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 08:39:53 +0000

[...] I did get out a bit, however. For about ten days at the end of January I travelled to Tokyo to attend a conference at Waseda University, where I was a research student for two years. The institute I was a research assistant at, the COE-CAS had something like a graduate student conference on East Asia and conceptions of East Asian community and I presented a paper there in Japanese on the persistence of transnational idealism in early postwar Japan and early post World War II Japanese perceptions of East Asia. It was a shortened and modified version of a seminar paper I had worked on the semester before. I got some useful comments, especially from my old advisor at Waseda and also got to meet many good friends in Tokyo. I posted a few anecdotes from my trip here at Muninn. I also presented another part of my transnational idealism in early postwar Japan project at “Political Trauma and Restoration: An Interdisciplinary Conference” at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in April. Attending the conference gave me a great chance to see what kind of work was being done on political trauma and postwar situations in many different academic fields but I don’t think my own presentation went very well. I realized too late that I needed to do a much better job of making my project accessible and relevant to those who many know very little about East Asia. This was a completely different environment from the Waseda conference, where I was the only non-Asian participant and could assume a lot about my audience’s knowledge and interest in the topic. While I was in Wisconsin I had a fun talk with a gas station attendant which I wrote about here at Muninn. [...]

By: Muninn

Muninn — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 23:46:30 +0000

Beijing Loafer – thanks for that comment. As you can tell, I’m all for caution in this regard. However, I wouldn’t stop at having familiarity with the region to make generalizations. Often those of us who have spent a lot of time in the region become blind to the similarities (virtues or problems alike) between those areas that we comment on and our own places. I found this to be true on my return to Norway two years ago (the first time in 5 years)…I found myself looking at the place with completely new eyes…

By: Global Voices Online » Blog Archive » The Illusion of “Pan-Asian Identity”

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 15:20:26 +0000

[...] Konrad Lawson tells a few anecdotes on a recent trip to Japan and discusses the illusion of the new pan-Asian identity movement – “a regional based ‘Asian identity’ which is constructed at the hands of intellectuals or political policy based on what will inevitably be a contradictory set of perceived commonalities between participants”. [...]

By: Beijing Loafer

Beijing Loafer — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 15:12:56 +0000

Really enjoyed your discussion on the illusion of “Pan-Asian identity”. Too many people tend to look for similarities where there’s none. Every single person who wants to make generalizing statement should be forced to prove that s/he knows intimately all the regions s/he is generalizing.

By: mark

mark — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 13:05:05 +0000

Sayaka,
I meant English support in Japan isn’t the problem. I just used central Europe as an example of an area where I saw and heard almost no English for two weeks, and came back to Japan to see bilingual everything in all public spaces. And quadrilingual signs in the Kanto area.

I use “tour” in a loose way, not the image of 50 old people following the young girl with the flag, but as something where certain things are taken care of, like tickets to concerts, hotels, plane tickets, and where they leave you alone if you want.

By: Sayaka

Sayaka — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 01:24:04 +0000

I miss Taiwan!, no, I mean Tokyo!

>mark
You mean central Europe offer a wide variety of tours?? Tours are good for some people but I don’t like joining them.

By: mark

mark — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:05:06 +0000

That tourist campaign is on the wrong track entirely. The problem isn’t a lack of English or infrastructure. I was recently on a trip to central Europe and the low English there (which was far lower than what you get in Japan) didn’t stop me and lots of other foreigners from enjoying ourselves.

There would be lots of interest in narrow-band tours. For example: Japanese rock concerts, anime, manga fairs come to mind immediately. Nostalgia tours for former JETs or armed forces personnel, car tours where you watch your car get made…the list goes on. But that’s not on offer, is it?

I like that poster though. Look at their eyes. You just know they’re not thinking about the map. It’s like the beginning of a bad porn flick. Hey, there’s another idea for a narrow-band tour…