Muninn

Going to bookstores when I’m back in Japan is one of my favorite things to do. Along with going to my favorite ramen noodle shops, hole in the wall cheap udon shops, and meeting friends, bookstores are right at the top of my Tokyo to-do list. Today I took a fellow historian and my host while I’m here to lunch in Shibuya. I spent most of the afternoon studying in a coffee shop and then went to the large Book First bookstore nearby.

Sometimes though I leave the bookstore with really mixed feelings. In fact, I feel a rant coming on… The sections of the bookstore I spend most of my time in (Modern Japanese history, Modern China/Korea history, and the 文庫 paperback section) inevitably have a range of offerings that just disgust me. I can’t help feeling like Shibuya Book First’s selection has gotten worse since when I lived here last in 2004.

Book First is not like the more heavily populist/right-wing smaller bookstores and does have a decent selection of materials. Today I bought the new introduction to modern history of East Asia (『未来を開く歴史』） written cooperatively by historians from China, Korea, and Japan who are trying to develop educational materials for the future. I was also pleased to see several volumes of a new series of books published by the joint Japan-Korea history group with some great looking articles in them (a bit pricey, I’ll get them at the library). Today there was even a full display dedicated to Edward Said translations which included some kind of showing of a documentary about him.

On the same floor though, as you approach the history books, I couldn’t help but notice a whole slew of new editions of Nitobe Inazô’s Bushido and various silly books on how contemporary Japanese should recover their Bushido warrior spirit and a pride in their people.

For the love of Lugalbanda, why can’t the nation just roll over and die…please…doesn’t the 21st century have enough to deal with? What I would give to be alive the day when we can all tear up our passports and laugh at how nonsensical the whole national project was. Those of us who wish to destroy the nation find ourselves continually narrating its violence in the tragic mode, but no one has mastered the tragic mode better than the nationalists themselves. At some point we have to embrace the comic mode and highlight the resounding stupidity of it. We have to move from celebrating the creative and imaginative nature of these communities to a more focused effort at reminding ourself of its farcical core. When it is someday finally severed from the state and that unholy union is finally broken, leave it be…but until then I say spare it no satirical sting; offer it no shred of credibility.

Ok, where was I? The history section seemed to have gotten a bit worse. Maybe it is just me but the selection for nationalist revisionists seems to have expanded somewhat. While not a very scientific measure, to give you an idea, in the standard “Nanjing incident” (Nanjing massacre) section, 4 out of 12 books were of the “what massacre?” variety. This despite the fact that three of the remaining volumes were compilations of interviews with Japanese soldiers who admitted participating in the slaughter (two of them) and of interviews of victims. I have written about one of these important works here at Muninn. I just cannot understand how, with such excellent empirical material out there, any major publisher can still put out such crap. What made it worse was that both of the books about the Nanjing occupation out on display were of “what massacre?” variety. One was a whole book dedicated to talking about the problematic pictures of the massacre (there are indeed many pictures used in Chinese materials about the massacre which have nothing to do with the occupation of Nanjing in 1937 or are otherwise problematic), and the other was a work discussing KMT party archives showing how they mobilized propaganda to spread anti-Japanese sentiment in the aftermath of the occupation of Nanjing. I don’t have any problem with either of the central claims at work in these two prominently displayed books (that there are many problematic pictures about the massacre and that the Nationalists and later Communists milked the massacre for all its propaganda potential) - it is just that neither of these facts prove a damn thing in the face of a mountain of evidence about the widespread slaughter.

Another really well-done right-wing book out by the fascist PHP publishing company I saw prominently displayed was a guide to “Must-know history facts about modern Japanese history” This book was essentially a well-organized manual for those sympathetic to any and all Japanese nationalist silliness. Divided into about fifty short and very concise chapters, it covers all the most controversial themes in modern Japanese history (with bonus chapters on the Dokdo/Takeshima crisis, all of Japan’s other “indisputable” disputed claims, etc.) There was about as much nuance and balance in these books as there is blue in the Japanese flag. Unfortunatley, unlike the many other babbling works by various nut jobs out there, what I think makes this kind of book highly effective was its “executive summary” approach - kind of a briefing booklet. For example, to take the Nanjing massacre chapter as an example, it provided nice one-paragraph summaries of the key arguments of the opposition and counter-arguments so that the defensive nationalist reader will be well-prepared for any debates they might get into with “masochistic” and unpatriotic countrymen. For example, it had one paragraph with pre-war Nanjing population estimates (to prepare the reader for a triumphant take-down when Chinese casualty estimates are shown to be higher, no mention of course of the swelling population of the city due to refugees), it counters the “Safe Zone” violation arguments with the classic “Chinese soldiers were throwing off their uniforms and pouring into the zone [Implied follow-up: so what was the poor Japanese military supposed to do if not charge in and start grabbing/killing males at random]” Of course, there is no mention of the fact that captured soldiers were gunned down by the thousands (Of course, if they had to admit this fact, which many Japanese soldiers there at the time do, they would respond with the classic and feeble, “But we had no food to feed them, and no resources to detain them indefinitely…it is the Chinese military which must take responsibility for leaving its forces in Nanjing to die while its commanders fled.”)

It is so exhausting to see this kind of crap. I’m so tired of it. It is so distracting. I wish I could just ignore it, as I usually do, but the fact that this kind of material reaches a growing audience, in ever more effective formats means that it would be irresponsible not to keep myself relatively familiar with the kinds of vacuous claims being made. Of course, the best way to deal with this is not always to get into the trenches and lower ourselves constantly to their level of repetitive and simplistic discourse, but it remains important for historians in our field to issue the occasional royal smack-down. I am happy to report, however, that what I saw today confirms that they don’t seem to have produced any significant new material other than their regular score of long-ago refuted or irrelevant nonsense. The demand for their drivel though, seems to continue unabated, and I suspect it will grow if nationalist sentiment continues to grow. Ultimately, any time spent thinking about this distracts those of us interested in Sino-Japanese relations history or wartime/colonial history in modern East Asia from the more challenging and, I believe, important work of moving beyond the huge shadow of some of these (non-)controversies. It is not just for the sake of reconciliation in the region, but because the violence of war goes well-beyond a few symbolically important events. There are so many questions to ask, so many issues worth addressing and I so wish we could finally get to the stage where the study of violent wars and imperialism can move beyond the perpetual national mudslinging and nationalist whitewashing that continues today.

Last summer, when I was heading on to Norway after a summer of study in Seoul, my fellow passengers and I found ourselves on the plane with the North Korean national soccer team. On Monday I began a repeat of last summer’s travel and next week I’ll begin a second summer of Korean language study at SNU’s program in Seoul. When I boarded the plan from Chicago to Tokyo (where I’m now hanging out for a week before traveling on to Korea) I found myself surrounded by Japan’s national wheelchair basketball team. One of the players was in my seat when I got there, and I got to see a performance of his amazing arm strength as he proceeded to move, with the use of his arms alone, from my seat to the one behind me.

I didn’t talk to any of players and kept my Japanese language ability “to myself,” but perhaps somewhat sneakily read over the shoulder of the team’s trainer sitting next to me. During our 12 hour flight the trainer spent several hours on two tasks: 1) He seemed to be contemplating game strategy for the team by writing notes feverishly on the back of his notepad, and evaluating the performance of the team in their last game (against Germany’s team it seems, guessing from the game performance worksheet he was filling out). 2) He spent a lot of time filling out daily workout summaries for the team. The detailed worksheets he filled out had some fascinating details. Under the category for “Morning” he wrote what they had for breakfast, and had the option of putting check marks next to two options for “A stroll” (散歩) and “Stretching.” He also detailed other meals the team ate during the day, and there was space on each worksheet for details of up to 5 daily workouts or “team gatherings” (集合) which he seemed to fill up with ease.

Most interesting was the fan mail which was, of course, none of my business, but which I read along with him nonetheless (He saw me staring at the letters but probably assumed I was a curious foreigner fascinated by all the funky Japanese characters rather than actually reading them). If any of you are fans of the Japanese wheelchair basketball team you can rest easy, your mail appears to be getting read. One particularly touching letter came from a Japanese junior high school student, who was a really dedicated fan (closing her letter with “Go Japan! Go Go Go Japan!”). After seeing its somewhat personal contents, I started feeling guilty about my reading and drifted off to sleep again.

Sayaka is back “home” in Taiwan this week. She is supposed to be doing research and conducting interviews but she also seems to be enjoying all her favorite foods while she is home and meeting her friends.

In a recent posting she talked about the differences in average salaries for those tutoring in Japanese and English in Taiwan:

日本人学生が家庭教師として日本語を教える場合、時給にして大体３５０〜５００元くらい（１１００〜１６００円）が相場だ。一方アメリカ人の場合は６００〜１２００元。う〜ん、差別だ！！と言ってみたがマーケットの需要が全然違うので仕方がない。本当の差別は「西洋人の見かけ（Western-looking)のアメリカ人」と指定しているところがあること。初めて聞いた時「は〜い〜？」と訳が分からなかったが、つまりアジア系アメリカ人などがなぜか排除されてる。

She says that Japanese students tutoring in Japanese can apparently get around 350-500 yuan (TWD, NT$) or about 11-15 US dollars while Americans can make 600-1200 yuan per hour or about 19-38 US dollars. While it seems like discrimination she admits this is really just an issue of market demand. On the other hand, apparently there are places which specifically are recruiting “Western-looking Americans” to teach English, and thus aren’t accepting Asian-Americans who are equally native in the language. I wonder if this is kind of discriminatory recruiting is common, and whether it is also something that happens in Japan or Korea? I know that I don’t see many Asian-Americans as teachers on the English language school advertisements on Japanese trains and subways (the advertisements are heavily dominated by white males, followed by white females, and the occasional black male or female).

In the aftermath of orals I have been trying to catch up on some blog reading and reading messages from H-Japan and the Korean Studies email lists. There was an interesting article in the North Korean press recently blasting the idea of a multiracial or multicultural Korea which got a lot of discussion online, including a post by Antti and a full translation of the article by Robert from the Marmot’s Hole. I was interested enough to make the Korean article my “assignment” for my one on one Korean reading class a few weeks ago. It was my first reading of a North Korean text and thus was interesting both for content and the language it used.

On the Korean Studies list discussion of this I especially enjoyed some responses to this article by Pak Noja which discussed some of the origins and evolution of ideas about race in Korea. Kenneth Quinones at Akita International University, whose essay on the Kabo reforms was on my orals list, also jumped into the discussion. After contributing his own thoughts on race in Korea (his full message is online here) he added a personal anecdote which reminds us how complicated the issue of race can get even for the United States:

Recently my daughter gave birth at a US Army hospital (the father is reluctantly en route to Iraq for his 2nd tour) to our first grandchild, a daugher. A nurse entered to gather information for the Washington State birth certificate and asked, “How can I describe your child’s race?” My daughter answered honesty, “Well my mother is Korean, my father half Irish and half Hispanic, and the baby’s father is of Dutch ancestry. Can you say, “Other?” The nurse responded, “Oh my - we should have the category ‘other’ but we don’t. I’ll just record ‘caucasian.’” In short, the importance of race persists in the USA, as in many other places including North Korea.

My orals (PhD general exam) are over and I passed. I don’t think that what I have to say about it differs much from what everyone seems to say about. I was terribly nervous leading up the exam, especially since I knew there were gaping holes in my knowledge.

Two days before the test I had a horrible nightmare that reflected my anxiety with almost textbook precision. In the dream I walked into my orals and seated myself in front of my examiners only to notice that I was wearing nothing but my underwear. In a moment of complete terror, I considered running out to find some clothes to put on but since the professors were already there I decided to pretend as if there was nothing unusual about my attire. The oral examination proceeded but all of us struggled collectively not to admit openly what we all knew: that I was almost completely naked before them.

The dream motivated me to make extra sure I had all my clothes prepared the day before (though I had to borrow some nice shoes from a roommate since winter boots, hiking shoes, and two pairs of sneakers are apparently all that I own). However, it was too late to remedy my more troubling epistemological nudity. I spent the last few hours before the exam reviewing notes and timelines but Rebecca was working in the history department’s library. She tried hard to convince me that nothing I read or reviewed at this point would make a bit of difference (ok, ok, she was totally right), and successfully distracted me by describing some recent online debates she was involved in concerning academics, breasts, and blogs, and the fact that the complete episodes of He-Man have been released on DVD. When I left the library to go eat something before my exam, instead of my four fields of history all I could think of for some reason were the cartoons that came up in our discussion and how much I would liked to have a kind of a “Care Bear Stare” power to dazzle my advisors during the exam. Then I got to thinking about which care bear I liked the best and wondered, again, if the show had planted anything subversive into my mind as a child. The end result of all this was to distract me from thinking about the trial to come, however, so I really owe Rebecca some thanks.

The exam itself was more like a two hour conversation with my four field advisors (the fields being Modern Korea, Modern Japan, Aftermaths of Modern War, and Early Modern European Intellectual History). After the exam the professors sent me out into the hall while they deliberated. There were a number of my friends outside waiting and my roommate Nick brought me a gallon of orange juice to celebrate (they all know I don’t drink, and the joke is that I drink enough orange juice that it, rather than blood, flows in my veins). When the professors emerged and announced the result, they seem to know from experience how anxious the waiting student can be and without fail they offered their warm congratulations and kind words.

As everyone else I spoke to also seemed to indicate, you don’t start thinking about exactly how incompetent some of your responses sounded during the exam until much later. In my case it wasn’t until the day after that this mental process kicked into gear. If there is one thing graduate students master very early on, it is how to tear any argument apart and dismiss the published results of years of hard historical research with a few sharp attacks. It is so bad in my case that I feel like somewhere along the line I should have been asked to take a class on “Reading Sympathetically” and perhaps one entitled, “Construction after Deconstruction.” At any rate, once my mind’s attack dogs were released onto the field of my memories about the event, there seemed to be no end to the folly of my orals performance.

Reflecting on this, I think this very destructive mental review process helps explain why so many of my friends have forgotten so many of the details of an event that I assumed would be forever retained. Already I can feel my mind trying to therapeutically smother the flames and bury the memory with vague images of smiling professors, the delicious looking cookies they served during the five minute break in the middle, and that strange warped blackboard I faced with one corner completely detached from the wall. Its over now, no need to continually reenact the whole two hours in my mind. I can now begin thinking more about a dissertation topic and the new rhythms and challenges of life as a third year student and teaching fellow.

I just found out (Via Antti’s posting on it) that you can imbed your Del.ici.us tags easily into a webpage. Mine are below (Because it is shown via javascript they will not show up in the RSS feed for this posting) but are completely disorganized thanks to the hodgepodge of often irrational (or misspelled) categories. I’ll fix it up someday.

I just came back from my last “mock orals” meeting (for my PhD general exams) today and it will all be over with the main event next Thursday afternoon. After the oral exam, all I have to do in order to get my PhD is write a book about something, right?

Instead of plunging back into my books and notes when I got home today, I really needed something to relieve my stress. I wanted to program something, anything really. I decided to bring my new alarm to the next level. It has been working wonderfully. However, to “set my alarm” each day I have to create an iCal event that triggers the elaborate process described in my previous posting. That is still not streamlined enough for me. If I woke up at the same time everyday like normal people I could just create a repeating event but my unhealthy sleeping schedule varies wildly.

Today I wanted to create something such that when I click it, it 1) asks me what time I want to wake up 2) Unless it is after midnight, it creates an alarm event in iCal for the next day (otherwise it creates one for today) which triggers my elaborate alarm at the time I told it. 3) It adjusts the computer’s wake up time to be 5 minutes before the alarm (The way I had it before, the computer’s scheduled wake up time did not fluctuate with the vast changes in my sleeping schedule). I’m not very experienced with applescript, which I used to accomplish my aim (I especially miss the great date and time functions of a language like PHP for example) but I got it to work. The resulting script is here, with the full text of the script below.
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